Bomb targets Russian Jewish community leader

An explosive envelope sent to the president of the Jewish community of Tatarstan in Russia, Mikhail Skoblionok Abramovich, went off Monday morning in Kazan, capital of Tatarstan, wounding the president and his aide, who were evacuated to a local hospital.

 

The police has launched an investigation, and it is not yet clear whether the motive was criminal or anti-Semitic.

However, sources familiar with the investigation said the case is being investigated as an attempted murder.

Skublinikur's desk, following the explosion (Photo: Business Gazeta)

The CEO and Executive Vice President of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), Robert Singer, said he trusts local authorities to find the assailant.

"I was very worried to hear about the explosion targeting the head of the Jewish community in Kazan, Tatarstan. I wish to extend my best wishes to Mr. Skoblionk and his family and hope for a speedy recovery," Singer said.

  

Tatarstan, Russia (Photo: Business Gazeta)

 

"I have known Mr. Skoblionok for more than 25 years, and have seen that the rebirth and well-being of his community was and is, to a large extent, thanks to his personal involvement. We fully trust that the local authorities are doing all in their power to investigate and ensure that the perpetrators behind this evil and sickening act are brought to justice as soon as possible,” he added.

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Haredi man attacked while walking to NYC synagogue

Lipa Schwartz, an American ultra-Orthodox Jew, was attacked in New York City on Sunday while walking to the synagogue.

  

The attack took place at 7:30am, in Brooklyn's Borough Park neighborhood.

Schwartz, 62, was on his way to the synagogue at 13th Avenue and 46th Street, carrying his tallit and tefillin, when a black vehicle pulled up next to him.

 

CCTV footage of the attack    (צילום: ארגון השומרים)

The driver, who appeared Middle Eastern, got out and chased Schwartz until catching up with him and assaulting him, punching him in the face and and yelling at him.

Schwartz tried to defend himself and was able to escape, but was followed by his attacker.

"I knew it’s either I fight myself out of this, or I might be dead,” Schwartz told local media.

CCTV footage of the attack. (Video: Hashomrim)

 

The NYPD was called to the scene and arrested the attacker, 37-year-old Afzal Farrukh of Staten Island, who was charged with assault, hate crime, harassment and more.

The Hatzolah aid organization of Borough Park evacuated the victim to the hospital, where he was treated for cuts and bruises to his head.

“Baruch Hashem, I’m out of the hospital with some minor bruises, but the trauma of being attacked by someone … will stay with me forever,” Schwartz said. 

     

A man who was trying to help the victim was also chased by the attacker. (Photo: Hashomrim)

The event was documented by CCTV from various angles, that also show another Jewish man who tried to help the victim but was chased away by Farrukh.

Local media reported that Farrukh shouted anti-Semitic slurs towards Schwarz, saying that he hates Jews and wants to kill all of them. However, a source at NYPD told the media that Schwarz provoked the attack, after he responded to Farrukh's slurs by crossing the road and hitting his car. The Anti Defamation League published earlier this year that between January 1st-September 30th, 2017, 1,299 anti-semitic incidents happened in the US—a dramatic 70 percent increase to the previous year, including physical attacks, vandalism and attacks on Jewish institutions.

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Famous Nazi hunter couple receives top French honors

France's most famous Nazi hunters, Serge Klarsfeld and his German wife Beate, received top honors in a ceremony led by French President Emmanuel Macron this week.

Serge Klarsfeld, 83, received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, France's highest award, while the 79-year-old Beate Klarsfeld received the National Order of Merit, having already been decorated with the Legion of Honor in 2014, with the rank of Grand Officer. The Chief Rabbi of France, Haim Korsia, was among those who attended the ceremony at the Elysee Palace limited to family and close friends and associates.

The couple in 1979; Famous for locating the notorious Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie (Photo: AP)

Born September 17, 1935, in the Romanian capital Bucharest, Serge Klarsfeld escaped the Holocaust after his family moved to France but saw his father taken away to die in the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp. He was naturalized in 1950, and 10 years later, while studying at the prestigious Science-Po university in Paris, Klarsfled met Beate Kuenzel, the daughter of a former German soldier, on a metro platform. The two, who married three years later, decided to bring fugitive Nazis to justice, a mission they pursued for more than half a century.

Emmanuel Macron giving the Klarsfeld's France's highest honours

  In one of their most high-profile cases, the Klarsfelds found the notorious Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, a former Gestapo officer known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for his wartime torture of prisoners, who had escaped to South America. In 1971, the Klarsfelds revealed that Barbie was living in Bolivia, and in 1983 he was extradited to France. Four years later he was convicted in a trial, and later died behind bars.

(Photo: AP)

  They also pursued members of France's collaborationist Vichy regime, including Rene Bouquet, Jean Leguay and Marice Papon—despite obstruction from president Francois Mitterrand. Mitterrand's successor Jacques Chirac finally recognized France's role in the deportations, a declaration Serge Klarsfeld said owed much to his and Beate's campaigning. "Neither could have succeeded without the other," their daughter Lida once said.

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Outcry as Jews create own group in German far-right party

'Free Gaza' sprayed on sukkah at Manhattan park

A public sukkah at the Carl Schurz Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side was vandalized on Sunday morning, with the words "Free Gaza" spray-painted three times on its walls.

  The NYPD's Hate Crime Task Force launched an investigation into the incident. "It's a slap in the face," Rabbi Ben Krasnianski, director of Chabad of the UES, told local media. "It's really very vicious. There is no room for this hatred in New York City."

Hate crime at Manhattan park

 

A group of locals covered the hateful writing with their own graffiti, writing "Shalom" and "Sukkah of Unity" on it.

"The only response we know, and the way we've responded for the last 3,800 years, is to respond to darkness with light, to hate with love and to negativity with positivity," Rabbi Krasnianski noted. The local Chabad House also held a street festival celebrating Jewish pride and solidarity on Monday night as another response to the hate crime, as well as to celebrate the last night of Sukkot.

The sukkah after the hate graffiti was covered

Assaf Weiss, the director of Programming and Operations at the American Jewish Congress, expressed concern of the "clear anti-Semitic act that took place in New York, a center of the Jewish community in the US." He noted the sukkah was erected by private Jewish citizens, who have no ties to the Israeli government and its actions. "Attributing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to all Jews is another example of modern anti-Semitism under the guise of 'political struggle,'" Weiss said. "According to the Anti Defamation League, there was a 57 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents across the US in 2017 alone. This horrible act of vandalism is another example of the concerning rise in anti-Semitism, and it stresses the importance of Jewish activity and advocacy by organizations such as the American Jewish Congress across the world," he added.

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Jews celebrate Simchat Torah holiday, ending festive period

Jewish men and women danced on Monday with scrolls of the Torah, celebrating the religious holiday of Simchat Torah (Rejoicing in the Torah) throughout Israel.

During the year, every Saturday in synagogue, devout Jews read a portion of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Simchat Torah marks the reading of the final portion and the start of the cycle for the next year.

(Photo: EPA)

(Photo: Idan Arbel)

On Simchat Torah valuable parchment scrolls are taken from their places of safe-keeping in synagogues into the streets and devout men and women dance with them.

(Photo: Idan Arbel)

(Photo: Shlomit Mantal)

The men also carry the scrolls around the synagogue in a series of seven circuits that symbolize the restart of the reading of the Torah.

(Photo: Oshrat Yitzhak)

In the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighbourhood, hundreds of rejoicers donning traditional fur hats and festive white, grey and golden robes packed the synagogues to celebrate the holiday, holding up Torah scrolls, singing and dancing.

(Photo: Reuters)

(Photo: EPA)

In Tel Aviv's popular Bograshov Street, Orthodox men and women gathered with the scrolls on the road, eating, drinking, dancing and singing.

(Photo: Eitan Elhadaz)

(Photo: Eitan Elhadaz)

Simchat Torah marks the end of the week-long festival of Sukkot and is the final holiday of almost a month of festivities that includes the Jewish New Year and the solemn fasting day of Yom Kippur.

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Germany arrests 7 suspected far-right extremists

German police have arrested seven men on suspicion of forming a "far-right terrorist organization" in Chemnitz, where neo-Nazis attacked a Jewish-owned restaurant last month, officials said Monday.

Six of the men, all German citizens aged between 20 and 30, were arrested Monday by tactical police units in Saxony, the state in which Chemnitz is located, and Bavaria, federal prosecutors said in a statement.

Far-right demonstration in Chemnitz (Photo: EPA)

A seventh suspect— 31-year-old German citizen identified as Christian K. for privacy reasons —was arrested in a separate case last month.

The suspects are the alleged founders of "Revolution Chemnitz", a far-right group operating in the the eastern city of Chemnitz, where a violent far-right, anti-Semitic mob hurled rocks, bottles and a metal pipe at a kosher restaurant on August 27.

Far-right demonstration in Chemnitz    (צילום: רויטרס)

While chanting "get out of Germany, Jewish pigs", and “we are the people,” a slogan used by far-right supporters, the demonstrators smashed the restaurant's window and vandalized the entrance.

The owner, Uwe Dziuballa, suffered an injury to the shoulder during the attack, the reports said.

 

The kosher restaurant, which opened in 2000, has been attacked several times before.

The Jewish restaurant owner, Uwe Dziuballa (Photo: AFP)

 

Although prosecutors didn't specify whether the suspects arrested are definitely linked to the attack, they said the men wanted to "carry out violent and armed attacks against foreigners and political enemies" as part of a plan to overthrow Germany's democratic order.

Five of the men—Christian K. and four others identified only as Sten E., Martin H., Marcel W. and Sven W.—allegedly attacked several foreigners in the center of Chemnitz on Sept. 14, armed with bottles, weighted "sap" gloves and a taser.

(Photo: EPA)

 

Prosecutors said the attack was a "test run" for another attack the men planned for Oct. 3, Germany's national unity day.

German Justice Minister Katarina Barley cited the arrest as further evidence of the threat posed by far-right extremists. "If the allegations are further substantiated, then investigators will have succeeded in conducting an important blow against far-right terrorism," she told the Funke newspaper group.

Violent far-right riots have erupted in the city since a German man was stabbed to death, allegedly by asylum-seekers, on August 26.

A 23-year-old Syrian is being held in custody on suspicion of manslaughter in the aforementioned case. An Iraqi man is also being sought over the killing.

"This is a new level of anti-Semitism. It's impossible not to compare this to what happened in the 1930s," The German Federal Commissioner to Combat anti-Semitism, Felix Klein said.

Germany's Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster (Photo: AP)

 

Germany's Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, said the attack shows "how strongly rooted right-wing extremism is in the region," adding that "attempts at appeasement and a lack of distancing from the right-populists play exactly into the hands of these forces.

The Chemnitz attack was the latest in a series of violent crimes by refugees that have garnered massive media attention and stoked anger at German Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to allow in more than one million migrants and refugees since 2015. After the German man was stabbed to death in August, thousands of local citizens and violent far-right members have taken to the Chemnitz mainly at night, with some seen flashing the illegal Nazi salute. In several cases violent riots included attacks on police officers, journalists and passersby suspected of being migrants.

German chancellor Merkel condemned the demonstrations and said that the scenes from Chemnitz "convey a message of hatred towards innocent people."

“That was a horrible incident. What we saw afterwards is something that has no place in a state under the rule of law,” she told a news conference in Berlin.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Photo: AFP)

 

“We won’t tolerate such unlawful assemblies and the hounding of people who look different or have different origins, and attempts to spread hatred on the streets,” Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert told a regular news briefing.

"That has no place in our cities and we, as the German government, condemn it in the strongest terms. Our basic message for Chemnitz and beyond is that there is no place in Germany for vigilante justice, for groups that want to spread hatred on the streets, for intolerance and for extremism," Seibert concluded.

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