Bylines Sam Sokol | Ottawa Jewish Bulletin

Jewish Agency’s Isaac Herzog blames ‘killing fields of social media’ for rising anti-Semitism

By Sam Sokol: February 19, 2019

Isaac Herzog, chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel, speaks at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly, Oct. 23, in Tel Aviv. He said the Israeli and North American Jewish communities need to talk, echoing the theme of the General Assembly. (Courtesy of JFNA)

Isaac Herzog, chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel, speaks at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly, Oct. 23, 2018 in Tel Aviv. He said the Israeli and North American Jewish communities need to talk, echoing the theme of the General Assembly. (Courtesy of JFNA)

JERUSALEM (JTA) – Social media are spreading anti-Semitism, Jewish Agency chief Isaac Herzog told American Jewish leaders meeting here, and are “a hotbed of the lunatics of the world.”

“The real dirt of the world comes up from the killing fields of social media,” he told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations at its annual gathering on Monday. [Read more…]

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Woman, 19, found dead on outskirts of Jerusalem

By Sam Sokol: February 8, 2019

Ori Ansbacher (Facebook)

Friends and family members attend the funeral of 19 year old Ori Ansbacher, in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, Feb. 8, 2019. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Jerusalem (JTA) – The unclothed body of a young woman, identified as 19-year-old Ori Ansbacher from the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, was found on the outskirts of Jerusalem on Thursday.

According to The Times of Israel, police described Ansbacher’s body, which was found in Ein Yael near the Biblical Zoo and the Arab village of Walaja, as exhibiting “signs of violence.” The police are examining both criminal and terrorist motives in the case. [Read more…]

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Majority of Israelis think Poland has to take more responsibility for Holocaust crimes

By Sam Sokol: February 8, 2019

(JTA) – More than three-quarters of Israelis believe that Poland has yet to take sufficient responsibility for the role Poles played in the Holocaust, according to a survey commissioned by the Polish embassy in Tel Aviv.

Keevoon Global Research surveyed more than 1,027 Israelis in December, with 76 per cent faulting Poland for not fully acknowledging Polish responsibility for what happened to Jews in the country during World War II, and 49 per cent saying that they see the eastern European nation in an unfavourable light. [Read more…]

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Holocaust scholars worry that memory is a victim of Israel’s warming ties with Eastern Europe

By Sam Sokol: January 30, 2019

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Polish President Andrzej Duda at the United Nations headquarters, in New York City, Sept. 26, 2018. (Avi Ohayon/GPO)

JERUSALEM (JTA) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to establish close ties with the European Union’s Central European members has met with pushback from a perhaps unlikely source: Holocaust historians and activists protective of Israel’s role in preserving the memories of the Nazis’ victims.

Netanyahu has justified his outreach to leaders in countries like Poland and Hungary as a way to counterbalance the EU’s more Palestinian-friendly western states. [Read more…]

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Why most recent immigrants to Israel aren’t considered Jewish

By Sam Sokol: January 4, 2019

Berta, who immigrated to Israel from Ukraine, seen in Jerusalem in 2012. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)

JERUSALEM (JTA) – For the first time, Israel announced that Jewish immigrants to Israel were outnumbered by non-Jewish immigrants.

The headlines might suggest that Christians and perhaps Muslims have been moving to the Jewish state in significant numbers, but the truth is more complicated: According to numbers released Monday by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, 17,700 of the 32,600 migrants who moved to Israel in 2018 came under the Law of Return but were listed as “having no religion.” [Read more…]

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Genesis Prize funds groups looking to close Israel’s stubborn gender gap

By Sam Sokol: September 5, 2018

The Genesis Prize Foundation gave grants to 37 organizations “dedicated to the advancement of women.” (Courtesy of the Genesis Prize Foundation)

TEL AVIV (JTA) – Hundreds of women, representing dozens of organizations, sat in the auditorium in this city’s Yitzhak Rabin Center listening to speaker after speaker stand and deliver paeans to feminism. In response, the women clapped raucously.

Their enthusiasm was understandable. Representing some 37 organizations dedicated to the advancement of women, they were celebrating their shares of a $1 million US grant from the Genesis Prize Foundation and the Kahn Foundation. [Read more…]

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Study finds widespread history of sexual abuse among formerly Orthodox

By Sam Sokol: July 19, 2018

A haredi man arriving for a court hearing in Jerusalem after being arrested for alleged sexual assault, March 27, 2017. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

(JTA) – While Jews are no more likely to be sexually abused than other Americans, individuals who have left the Orthodox community are more than four times as likely to have been molested as children than the general population, a new study has found.

The study, by two Orthodox Jewish researchers, surveyed more than 300 participants over a three-year period. Its authors – Dr. David Rosmarin of Harvard and Dr. David Pelcovitz of Yeshiva University – said their report was an attempt to address a lack of research on the prevalence of sexual abuse in the Jewish community. [Read more…]

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In Jerusalem, Ruth Bader Ginsburg celebrates her commitment to tikkun olam

By Sam Sokol: July 6, 2018

Benjamin Freidenberg, an Israeli filmmaker, interviews Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, July 5, 2018. (Natasha Kuperman)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, third from right, receives the inaugural Genesis Prize Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in Tel Aviv, July 4, 2018. (Eran Lamm/Lens Productions)

JERUSALEM (JTA) – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described how grateful she was for her Jewish heritage during a screening of a new documentary film about her life and career at the Jerusalem Cinematheque.

“The demand for justice, peace and enlightenment runs through Jewish history and tradition,” she said Thursday, describing how she is reminded of this fact every day when she enters her judicial chambers and is confronted with a poster proclaiming the biblical verse, “Justice, justice thou shalt pursue.” [Read more…]

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These academics want to mend Israel-Diaspora relations. But can this marriage be saved?

By Sam Sokol: June 25, 2018

Adam Ferziger is a history and contemporary Jewry professor at Bar-Ilan University. (Courtesy of Ferziger)

(JTA) – When Adam Ferziger wants to describe the “deteriorating” relationship between American and Israeli Jews, he reaches back to a 2,000-year-old divide.

“To use a metaphor, we have a contemporary Jerusalem and Babylon kind of dynamic,” said Ferziger, a history and contemporary Jewry professor at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, “with two truly significant creative and vibrant Jewish centres developing across the world from each other.” [Read more…]

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‘Terror kites’ shake residents in southern Israel, but not their resolve to stay put

By Sam Sokol: June 13, 2018

A firefighter extinguishing a blaze in the Beeri Forest on the Israeli border with Gaza, where flaming kites sent from Gaza have caused thousands of shekels of damage, June 11, 2018. (Sam Sokol)

NAHAL OZ, Israel (JTA) – Dani Ben David fiddles with his radio, switching between it and his cellphone as he drives through the Beeri Forest, a nature reserve located on the border of Israel and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

As his Jeep jolts over the dirt road, he quickly and calmly jumps between multiple conversations, coordinating efforts to extinguish the multiple fires that have sprung up across his territory. As regional director for the Western Negev for Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund, Ben David is responsible for maintaining the forest’s tens of thousands of acres in the face of Palestinian efforts to torch them and the surrounding farmland.

Since April, more than 450 open-air fires have been set along the border region by kites and balloons carrying incendiary materials launched from Gaza. Flying aimlessly over the kibbutzim, they have turned large swatches of what was once an oasis of green in a dry and dusty south into a charred landscape. [Read more…]

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