The fifteenth annual rally commemorating the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, will evidently be the last. The Rabin Institute announced that in light of falling attendance the annual assembly will be discontinued. Instead, his death will be commemorated by a state ceremony at his gravesite on Mt. Herzl in
When arsonists attacked a mosque at Beit Fajjar, south of Bethlehem, they left behind singed copies of the Koran and burned prayer rugs alongside graffiti messages that announced “revenge,” “a mosque must be burned,” and “price tag.” “Price tag” is a term used by radical settlers who say they are determined to exact a price
To visit the offices of the Hotline for Migrant Workers is to encounter the enormous vitality of Israeli civil society. HMW, a grassroots organization, was created in 1998 to prevent abuse of migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers in Israel. Entering a nondescript building on Nahalat Binyamin Street in downtown Tel Aviv, you climb the stairs
In the midst of so much heartbreaking news out of Haiti, there is modest consolation for Israelis in reports about their country’s relief efforts. The army sent a field hospital. Civil society—including the IsrAID coalition, to which AJC has given $110,000 to date—sent rescue and medical teams. Through this assistance, babies were safely born (one
Misunderstandings often reveal more about a society than premeditated public statements. A good example was a Jerusalem Post headline last week that inadvertently cast a spotlight on the profound dilemmas that face Israeli human-rights NGOs.AJC has warm ties with Israel’s watchdog civil-society groups. We are in regular touch with organizations like B’tselem and the Israel Religious Action
Dr. Moshe Itzhaki, an old friend, is a soft-spoken former kibbutznik, a farmer and paratrooper who began his university studies in his thirties and is today a respected professor of Hebrew literature. Moisheleh, as he is universally known, is also a poet who makes the Hebrew language sing—lyrically, boisterously, with a delicious earthy complexity that
Once again, people not born Jewish who decide to link their fate to the Jewish people are discovering that the representatives of the state of the Jews are not their allies, but rather mistrustful inquisitors, suspicious of their decision. This time it is the Interior Ministry, which recently circulated instructions requiring its clerks to apply administrative
Clearly, encouraging conversion is a key factor in ensuring the future of Diaspora Jewry, and a posture of intransigence taken by the government – refusal to accept converts as full members of the Jewish people – threatens the Jewish future. read more http://bit.ly/TleoTN
