Yad Vashem, Israel’s esteemed Holocaust memorial center, on Thursday denounced the growing number of rabbis forbidding the rental or sale of property to non-Jews, saying it was an “egregious blow to the values of our lives as Jews and human beings in a democratic state.”
The prohibition, widely seen as being aimed against Israel’s Arab population, was condemned by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and brought calls for the publicly funded rabbis involved to be sacked.
In a rare intervention, Yad Vashem said in a statement: “Past experiments have taught us just how important, and at the same time how fragile, these basic values are ... We know that the Jewish people, that knew suffering and persecution and which has experienced ostracism and the revocation of basic rights, has expressed its stance on matters such as these with voices different to those we have heard today.”
According to the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, about 300 rabbis have now signed a letter backing the ruling, originally issued by Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed, a town dominated by ultra-orthodox Jews. Many of the signatories are publicly funded municipal rabbis or principals of religious educational institutions.
“The Arabs don’t truly want a Jewish neighbor. What they truly want is to conquer places and to seize control of the country. What, do we want to be like Europe, where the Arabs frighten everyone off and bring down the prices?” Rabbi Elyakim Levanon said.
“The minorities ... are flooding the Jewish cities — and I am troubled by that, just like the other rabbis,” another said.
However, Rabbi Yehuda Gilad said he was “ashamed as a faithful Jew,” calling the ruling “an act of public desecration of the holy name.”
A group of intellectuals and academics have joined appeals by politicians and others for Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein to suspend rabbis who have endorsed the ruling and who are also public servants.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of