During the week covered by this review, we received 7 articles on the following subjects:
Israel
Christians in Israel
Interfaith Dialogue
Jewish Attitudes Concerning Christians
Book Reviews
Archaeology
Israel
Haaretz, August 17, 2015
The Rishon LeTzion Magistrate’s Court has added new charges, including the charge of sedition, to the indictment against Moshe Orbach (24) of Bnei Brak, originally arrested in connection with the arson at the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes at Tabgha. Orbach had first been indicted in the Nazareth Magistrate’s Court on charges of possession of material inciting to violence and terror. He was released to house arrest when it was found that due to the geographical location of the offenses he was charged with, the Nazareth court had no jurisdiction over him. However, due to the amended indictment, which also includes a charge of possession of racist material, Orbach has been “remanded until the end of proceedings against him.” Judge Menahem Mizrahi ruled that “there is a reasonable concern that if freed, the respondent would endanger public safety,” and that the document Orbach wrote—the reason for the amended indictment, entitled “The Kingdom of Evil”—“was not written by a person expressing his own inner thoughts, musing with hopes for the future, but rather a clear concrete prescription how to commit extreme violence.”
Makor Rishon, August 21, 2015
A group of 15 student body presidents and chairpersons from leading universities in the United States recently completed a visit to Israel, under the initiative of Israeli university students volunteering for the Stand With Us advocacy organization’s public diplomacy program. Only two of the visitors were Jewish, and some had not visited the country before. During their visit, the group met with Israeli and Palestinian government officials, members of Knesset, and prominent security officials. The group was favorably impressed with the wide spectrum of opinions presented to them by civilians and military personnel, and their consensus at the end of the visit was that they are now much better informed as to the real situation, and will be able to state to anyone in their universities that that it is much more complex than presented by the media.
Christians in Israel
Yediot Haifa, August 14, 2015
The committee in charge of Christian schools in Haifa has decided to intensify their fight for equal funding, stating that the Ministry of Education has “broken the understanding with the Christian schools that had been intended to solve the schools’ severe financial problems.” Some of the educators in the Arab sector wish to turn this into a general fight, citing the fact that the Christian schools in Haifa accept 70% of all Arab students, including Druze and Muslim children.
The response received from the Ministry of Education stated that “it acts to provide each child with equal opportunities” and therefore “encourages the known but not formal schools to join the general education system, so that they would be eligible for 100% funding, on the understanding that each institution’s uniqueness would be preserved, but that joining the general system is done of the institution’s own choice.” A meeting took place with the Christian educators in an attempt to solve the problem, but the Christian educators rejected all ministry proposals, leading to their continued funding at the law-determined rate.
Interfaith Dialogue
The Jerusalem Report, August 19, 2015
Although for hundreds of years, Christian anti-Semitism “robbed [Jews] of their idealism, teaching them that the world is an unreliable and dangerous place,” “it would serve our own self-interest as a people to recognize that the Roman Catholic Church … as well as many other Christian groups and individuals, are now our partners in the struggle against anti-Semitism.” The article ends by quoting the late Rabbi Leon Klenicki, “Through dialogue, Christianity must overcome the triumphalism of power, Judaism the triumphalism of pain.”
Jewish Attitudes Concerning Christians
The Jerusalem Post, August 19, 2015
In this article, Raphael Rosenbaum responds to Avraham Avi-Hai’s article entitled “How I almost became a Catholic, and why I am angry with the Catholic Church” (The POSTman Knocks Twice, August 14). Rosenbaum states that although Palestinian Christians “became virulently anti-Semitic with the support of the church,” they are still persecuted by their Muslim neighbors and the church ignores this. Neither does the church protest Muslim “rewriting of early Jewish history on the Temple Mount, ‘thus erasing the historical basis for Christianity itself,’” or the “massacres of African Christians.” “This is tantamount to historical suicide” and “emphasizes the weakness of the Catholic Church.”
Book Reviews
Makor Rishon, August 21, 2015
This article reviews Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld’s The War of a Million Cuts: the Struggle against the Delegitimization of Israel and the Jews, and the Growth of New Anti-Semitism (The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, RVP Press New York, 2015, 501 pages).
Serving as an “encyclopedia of the new anti-Semitism,” Gerstenfeld’s book recounts each of the sources of the new hatred of Israel, from church organizations to political parties to civil organizations. The “uniqueness of the book is in that it presents the delegitimization of Israel as a ‘powerful process’ which continues to penetrate European society, wounding the Jewish people and the State of Israel with wounds that are like ‘a million cuts.’”
Gerstenfeld states that although the Second World War “distanced” anti-Semitism for a time, it in fact never ended, and such anti-Semitic waves as occurred after the Second Lebanon War and Operation Protective Edge are only exacerbated by the disguise of “legitimate criticism of Israel” and increased Muslim immigration to Europe. The “unholy alliance between the Muslims and the disillusioned left-wing” led to the 2001 declaration at Durban calling Israel a racist apartheid state and to the BDS movement, which takes this declaration as its foundation.
All this has caused 40% of Europeans to have some degree of anti-Semitic feeling; many of them consider Israel to be as dangerous to peace as are Iran and North Korea, and the accusations of genocide against Israel have become truth in the eyes of the European Union.
Archaeology
Shavshevet, August 12, 2015
Two months ago a Jewish ritual bath was discovered in excavations in Jerusalem’s Arnona neighborhood. Upon investigation, the site was proven to date to the Second Temple period. It consists of a subterranean cave with an anteroom and benches around the periphery, with many frescoes and Aramaic inscriptions on the walls. Roi Grinwald and Alex Wigman, heads of the excavation from the Israel Antiquities Authority, stated, “It is without doubt a significant discovery. Such a high concentration of such well-preserved symbols and inscriptions in one site is rare and unique.” To date, the inscriptions and symbols, as well as the connection between them, have yet to be deciphered.