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Friday March 9, 2007

Shorts: World

B’nai B’rith Canada prepares indictment against Iran’s chief

Representatives of B’nai Brith Canada have prepared an indictment against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on charges of incitement to genocide against the Jewish people.

The indictment “moves the debate away from theoretical pronouncements to legally actionable offences,” said David Matas, B’nai Brith’s senior legal counsel. “It also marks the first step in what must be a sustained effort by Canada and the international community to use all legal tools at their disposal to prosecute the Iranian president before it is too late.”

The organization presented the indictment to the Department of Foreign Affairs this week and urged the government to ban Ahmadinejad from entering Canada, prosecute him for incitement to genocide and lobby the United Nations to take the matter to the International Criminal Court. — jta

German bishops compare Arabs to Jews under Nazis

Jewish leaders in Germany are enraged by two German Catholic bishops’ remarks comparing conditions of Palestinians to those of Jews under the Nazis.

Yediot Achronot reported that German Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke said, “This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem, and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto.” Hanke reportedly made the remark during a visit to Bethlehem.

The Bishop of Augsburg Walter Mixa then remarked that it was a “ghetto-like” situation and that it was “almost racism,” according to Der Spiegel.

The remarks were “appalling and completely unacceptable,” said Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, in a statement Tuesday, March 6.

“If Bishop Gregor Hanke compares — and thus equates — the Warsaw Ghetto and the fate of the Jews interned there during the Holocaust with the situation of the Palestinians in Ramallah, then this reveals either alarming deficits in his knowledge of history, or he is trying to turn the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and their children today into perpetrators, and to play the role of therapist himself,” Knobloch said.

“Not only does it misrepresent the facts of the conflict in the Middle East and Israel’s security situation to impute racist motives a la Nazi Germany to the state of Israel and its government, but it also promotes cliches that are borderline anti-Semitic.”

In a statement, the Hanke said: “Comparisons between the Holocaust and the current situation in Palestine are not acceptable and were not intended.” — jta

French rental laws ban Jews from

Cote d’Azur

A ban on renting apartments to Jews on France’s Cote d’Azur reportedly has not been changed since it was enacted under the World War II-era Vichy government.

The law requires that applicants for certain apartments attest that they are “French, non-Jews, and not married to a Jew, in the legal sense currently in effect.” The newspaper Nice-Matin, which discovered the law, reported that Jews who wish to buy an apartment in Nice must pay an extra $1,000 to $10,000 in notary fees to get around these articles, and that such articles are probably in effect in other towns in France as well.

Marine Ouaknine, president of the local CRIF, the umbrella organization of secular Jewish groups, told Le Figaro that she was “shocked” to learn that the law was still on the books. “This is the highest degree of horror imaginable,” Ouaknine said. She called for local real estate agencies and cooperative boards to “take the initiative” to change the law. — jta

Hungary’s leader warns of rising

anti-Semitism

Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany said in an interview published last week that the hatred of Jews in Hungary has reached new heights since a wave of anti-government protests last year.

“I have to say that there have never been so many anti-Semitic remarks as now,” Gyurcsany told Britain’s Times newspaper. Hungary’s left-leaning government was disgraced in September after it was revealed to have lied about the economy in order to win the previous election.

Gyurcsany said that during the resulting demonstrations, protesters tried to blame Jewish politicians, apparently with the encouragement of right-wing opposition members. “There is something horrible happening,” said Gyurcsany, whose wife is of Jewish descent. — jta

Polish Jewish cemetery vandalized again

Vandals in western Poland badly damaged half the tombstones in a Jewish cemetery.

Ten tombstones in the Jewish cemetery of Swidin were broken March 1, according to Albert Stankowski of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Warsaw. “This was done during the same time as the Claims Conference was visiting in Poland, and I have no doubt that the act against the cemetery was related,” he said. Stankowksi was referring to a Claims Conference meeting last week with the government about compensation for Jewish property stolen by the Nazis and communists.

“The articles in the press gave readers the feeling that the Jews were coming to take their property away, and an evangelical priest in the town thinks the people who did this to the cemetery were reacting to that,” he said. It was the third time in five years that the cemetery was attacked. — jta

Russian sentenced

for anti-Semitic

messaging

A Moscow law student was sentenced to 150 hours of public service for sending anti-Semitic text messages aired on local television in May.

The Interfax news agency reported that Andrei Kachanov, 22, was sentenced by a Moscow-area court Monday, March 5. Kachanov sent a series of SMS messages to the Radonezh Municipal Television and Radio Company attacking Jews and other non-ethnic Russians during a May 9 broadcast celebrating Victory Day.

The messages were displayed during the broadcast. In a statement on its Web site, the Moscow Region Prosecutor’s office called the messages “an affront to the national dignity of representatives of the Jewish ethnicity and non-Russians as a whole.” — jta

Beijing gets first kosher restaurant

Beijing’s first kosher establishment recently opened for business.

Located near several major international hotel chains, Dini’s Kosher Restaurant is under the directorship of Chabad emissaries Rabbi Shimon and Dini Freundlich. The restaurant is named for Chabad emissary Dini Freundlich, according to Shmais.com. — jta

Madrid launches Jewish museum

A Jewish museum has been opened in Madrid to mark the 90th anniversary of the city’s first synagogue.

Jacobo Israel Garzon, president of the community described the new museum as “a house of memory holding not only a part of the memory of the Jewish community but also the memory of Madrid.”

Esperanza Aguirre, president of the Autonomous Region of Madrid added that “the 90 years which have passed since the construction of the first synagogue have been very hard in that there never lacked moments of persecution,” but that Madrid is now a place where Jews can live in freedom. — jta

Ukraine halts construction near massacre site

Ukrainian authorities have agreed to suspend hotel construction near the site of an 18th-century massacre of Jews.

Meir Porush, leader of the Israeli political party United Torah Judaism, and Israel’s Foreign Ministry had protested the work on a new hotel some 300 feet from the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, where the Massacre of Uman took place in 1768, according to Bratslav Chassidim. Jewish leaders want the site classified as a memorial heritage site.

Thousands of Chassidic pilgrims visit Uman, a manufacturing center in central Ukraine that is home to some 95,000 people, around Rosh Hashanah and Purim to visit the grave of Rabbi Nachman, a prominent Chassidic leader who died in 1810. — jta

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