NOVANEWS
German gov’t, Jews disagree over funds
Orthodox Jewish community accuses federal government of discrimination for not funding Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin while providing money to more liberal seminary
Germany’s Orthodox Jewish community is accusing the government of discrimination for not funding the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin while providing money to the country’s only other seminary, which is more liberal.
For almost a year, Orthodox Jewish leaders have repeatedly asked the federal government to support their seminary with the same amount of annual funding that it gives the liberal Abraham Geiger Kolleg – about €300,000 ($410,000) through the German Interior Ministry – Rabbi Josh Spinner of the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary told The Associated Press on Thursday.
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Now, Spinner said, he has decided to make his complaints public.
“What has begun as a simple request for funding has turned into discrimination and a case about what moral, historical and legal rights the German government has to choose its Jews,” said Spinner, who is a board member of the seminary. “We are expecting the government to treat all religious denominations equally.”
But Rabbi Walter Homolka, the director of the Abraham Geiger Kolleg – founded in 1999, 10 years before the Rabbinical Seminary – defended the German government’s stand, saying that the Orthodox seminary had only been around for a very short time and needed to prove the value of its education first.
“Otherwise, every religious group could come and say it wants money from the German government,” Homolka said.
Despite not providing the Rabbinical Seminary funds, the German Interior Ministry noted it supports the education of Orthodox rabbis in Germany by providing an annual grant of €500,000 ($685,000) to the Heidelberg Learning Center for Jewish Studies.
However, the Heidelberg school does not ordain rabbis, the school’s spokeswoman Desiree Martin said.
A spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry, who did not give her name in line with department policy, said the ministry was continuing talks about the issue but had no further comment.
Stephan Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews – which represents both liberal and Orthodox Jewish communities – criticized the government for treating the two denominations “unequally” but said he wouldn’t go as far as saying the government was discriminating against the Orthodox community.
“It is obviously not correct that the liberal seminary gets extra funding which the Orthodox seminary does not get,” Kramer told the AP.
Around 250,000 Jews live in Germany today, far less than the country’s flourishing Jewish community of 560,000 – and its cultural and intellectual prominence – before the Third Reich. Some six million European Jews were killed in the Nazi genocide, including 200,000 from Germany.
According to Kramer, the majority of Jews in Germany who belong to religious communities can be described as living a traditional form of Judaism that’s “somewhere between liberal and Orthodox.”
“There are about a handful of communities who are truly Orthodox and the same amount of liberal communities,” Kramer said.
There is a separation of church and state in Germany. No religious group has the right to expect financial support from the government, but once the government decides to provide funding for one group, other groups can demand equal treatment and also demand funding, said Benjamin Ladiges, a lawyer familiar with the case.
Traditionally, the government collects church taxes from people who register themselves as Catholic or Protestant, then transfers the money to the churches. The government does not collect taxes from Muslims or Jews, but it does support the Central Council of Jews in Germany with €5 million grant annually for rebuilding Jewish life in Germany.
Recently, the German government also gave a €300,000 grant to train imams at a new program at the University of Osnabrueck which will last through 2013.
Al-Qaeda denies plot to target Muslim pilgrims
Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula denied on Sunday it would stage any action to coincide with the Muslim Hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia after a Saudi minister said such an operation could not be ruled out.
“We are against any crimes against pilgrims … Hajj is a pillar of Islam and we are most eager (not to spill) the blood of Muslims, wherever they may be. Mecca is more sacred than any other place,” AQAP said in a statement posted on an Islamist website often used by militants. (Reuters)
Bush on post-presidency: I miss being pampered
Former President George W. Bush says he doesn’t miss much about the White House, just the pampering.
Bush told more than 3,000 people at a sprawling central Florida retirement community on Saturday that he misses the convenience of the presidential jet Air Force One and never waiting in traffic jams. The 43rd president said, most of all, he misses being commander in chief of the US military. (AP)
Allegations of racism and questions about an Israeli town’s character
By Joel Greenberg
SAFED, ISRAEL –
(Washington Post) In the winding stone alleys of this Galilee hill town, a centuries-old center of Jewish mysticism, a campaign is underway.
It is being waged by the town rabbi, Shmuel Eliahu, who along with other area rabbis issued a religious ruling several months ago forbidding residents to rent apartments to Israeli Arab students from the local community college.
The rabbi has warned that the Jewish character of Safed, long revered as sacred, is at risk and that intermarriages could follow if the students mingle with the locals.
Last month, Eliahu called a public meeting to sound the alarm. On the agenda was “the quiet war,” a reference to the feared Arab influx, and “fighting assimilation in the holy city of Safed.”
Several days later, a building that houses Arab students was attacked by a group of young Jews, and an elderly Holocaust survivor renting a room to students received threats.
To civil rights advocates and other critics, the unsettling developments in this normally quiet community of 32,000 are a window into ugly currents of racism in Israeli society. The events here, the critics say, reflect a general atmosphere of growing intolerance under a government and parliament dominated by parties of the nationalist right.
Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said that public attitudes have been legitimized by proposals in parliament that send a message of exclusion to Israeli Arabs. One bill authorizes rural Jewish communities to review applications for residence on the basis of social and cultural compatibility, language that critics say is code for keeping out Arabs.
But people in Safed dismiss the accusations of racism, saying that the issue is a culture clash between rowdy Arab students and the city’s strictly religious Jews who feel that their way of life is being threatened.
In a city park next to a college building on a recent afternoon, “Death to Arabs” was scrawled on a gatepost. The park is a hangout for the Arab students, who were scattered on benches during a break between classes.
Nasrat Ghadban, a student from the village of Arrabeh, said that he had been trying to find an apartment to rent in Safed but that his phone inquiries were repeatedly turned down.
When people hear my accent, they say they’re sorry, but they don’t rent to Arabs,” Ghadban said. “Other times, if they hear you have an Arab name, they say they have tenants already or that they’ll get back to you, but they never do.”
Similar accounts were heard from other Arab students, who make up about half of the student population at the school, the Tzfat Academic College. Because of a shortage of dormitory space, many Arab students commute from their villages. Some who have found apartments in Safed said they have recently felt uneasy walking the streets and preferred to stay in at night, fearing run-ins with religious Jewish youths.
Last month, a group of young Jewish men attacked apartments of Arab students near the old city of Safed. An indictment against two of the assailants said that before the attack, the group had talked about an increasing presence of Arabs in town and their alleged harassment of local Jewish women.
The mob gathered outside a building housing Arab students, shouted “Death to Arabs!” and “Stinking Muslims!” and hurled stones and bottles, smashing a window, according to the indictment. The Arab students threw stones back, and a shot was fired by one of the Jewish youths. He and the other indicted youth were charged with racist incitement, rioting and vandalism.
Eliahu Zvieli, an 89-year-old resident of the old city who rents a room to three Arab students, said he had received numerous phone calls and visits, including from Rabbi Eliahu, urging him to remove his tenants. One caller threatened to burn down Zvieli’s house, he said. A sign was posted on the gate calling the Arabs’ presence “a shameful disgrace.”
Zvieli, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary who endured forced-labor and prisoner-of-war camps, said he was not fazed. “I’ve been through a few things, and I’m handling it,” he said. “You can’t surrender to terror.”
Across the street at his food stand, Yosef Pe’er, bearded with a large knitted skullcap, said that providing housing for Arab students in the heart of the old city, where many strictly Orthodox and newly observant Jews live, is a provocation.
“This place has a particular character, and it’s preferable that it remain Jewish,” he said. Arab students drive by in cars blaring loud music on Friday night, during the Jewish Sabbath, and generally “don’t respect where they are,” Pe’er said.
Safed’s mayor, Ilan Shohat, said the students were “behaving like they were back in their villages.” He said the municipality had received complaints from religious residents after Sabbath weekends of disruptive behavior by students, ranging from playing loud music to smoking a hookah opposite a synagogue and badgering young women.
“Safed is not a racist city at all,” Shohat said. “There’s a cultural problem, which because of the Jewish-Arab divide in Israeli society, is interpreted by the residents as a provocation.”
Arab students denied the allegations of inappropriate behavior, saying that most stay home on weekends and that those in town were often at work at hotels, replacing Jewish employees who were off Saturdays. Some students noted that they had warm relations with their Jewish landlords, who they said treated them like family.
On the streets of Safed, memorial plaques commemorate Jewish fighters killed in the town during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. Safed’s Arab majority fled the fighting, changing it from a mixed city to a Jewish one. The sign plastered on the home of Zvieli, the man threatened for renting to Arab students, accused him of “returning Arabs to Safed.”
Yisrael Lee, an architect and a neighbor, said that the past still hangs heavy over the town. “Memories here are strong,” he said.
British politician: ‘Israel is the root cause of terrorism’
Liberal Democratic peer asks why world allows Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to continue – “Is it Holocaust guilt?”
LONDON – In the second attack on Israel by Liberal Democrat politicians in the same week that the party’s leader said the party got it wrong on Israel, Jenny Tonge claimed on Friday that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is the root cause of terrorism worldwide.
Possibly “Holocaust guilt” allows this treatment to go unchecked, Tonge said, adding that it might also be the “power of the pro-Israel lobby” in the UK and US.
The Liberal Democrat peer was speaking in the House of Lords at the Strategic Defense and Security Review, which sets out how the British government will deliver the priorities identified in its national security strategy.
On the issue of world conflict prevention, Tonge then said: “It is a disgrace to us all that problems such as Kashmir and Palestine are still alienating Muslims all over the world.
“The treatment of Palestinians by Israel is held up as an example of how the West treats Muslims,” she said, “and is at the root cause of terrorism worldwide.”
“Even [the Quartet’s Middle East envoy] Tony Blair has now admitted this publicly,” she claimed.
“Why do we let it continue? Is it Holocaust guilt? We should be guilty – of course we should. Is it the power of the pro-Israel lobby here and in the USA?” The peer went on say that “cynics might think” Britain is at the ready to help Israel attack Iran.
“Or is it the need, maybe, to have an aircraft carrier called Israel in the Middle East, from which to launch attacks on countries such as Iran? The cynic might think that that is why HMS Ark Royal and the Harriers [fighter jets] can be dispensed with [as part of UK defense cuts] – [since] we already have a static “Ark Royal” in a strategic position, armed to the teeth and ready to fight, provided that we do not offend Israel,” she said.
Tonge, a lifelong anti-Israel activist, continued: “I feel sorry for the people of Israel sometimes. Their government’s policies have made that country the cause of a lot of the world’s problems, yet now they are seen in the middle as the remedy and the base for the West to fight back.”
The party has distanced itself from Tonge’s comments, which “do not reflect the views of the Liberal Democrats,” a spokesman told The Jerusalem Post on Saturday. “Indeed, last week [party leader] Nick Clegg stressed that Israel’s right to thrive in peace and security is non-negotiable for Liberal Democrats.”
Last week, Liberal Democrat peer Lord Phillips told a meeting of the radical fringe group Palestine Solidarity Campaign in parliament that “Europe cannot think straight about Israel because of the Holocaust, and America is in the grip of the well-organized Jewish lobby.”
These two incidents came in the same week that Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg told a meeting of Liberal Democrat supporters of Israel that his party had got it wrong on Israel.
“I’m not certain that we have always made ourselves clearly heard on this, so let me say it again now: Israel’s right to thrive in peace and security is nonnegotiable for Liberal Democrats.
“No other country so continually has its right to exist called into question as does Israel, and that is intolerable. There can be no solution to the problems of the Middle East that does not include a full and proper recognition of Israel by all parties to the conflict,” he said.
“Campaigning for justice for the Palestinian people has been heard loud and clear from the Liberal Democrats, [and] it should always have been accompanied, equally loudly and equally clearly, by an awareness of the security challenges faced by Israel, and of the right of Israel to defend itself against the threats that it continually faces,” Clegg added.
In February, Clegg sacked Tonge as health spokeswoman in the Lords after she suggested that Israel set up an inquiry to refute allegations that its medical teams in Haiti “harvested” organs of earthquake victims.
It is not the first time the Liberal Democrat politician has been sacked by the party for her comments on Israel.
In 2006, then party leader Menzies Campbell dissociated the party from Tonge and condemned her for “clear anti-Semitic connotations” after she said that “the pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips. I think they have probably got a certain grip on our party.”
In 2004, Tonge was sacked as a spokeswoman on children’s issues after suggesting she could consider becoming a suicide bomber.
NY Times urges Netanyahu to ‘stop playing games’
Editorial accuses prime minister of choosing domestic politics over peace
WASHINGTON – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prefers to maintain his coalition over making peace with the Palestinians, the New York Times charges.
“It’s time for him to stop playing games, reinstate the moratorium, get back to negotiations and engage seriously in a peace deal,” the paper said in a scathing editorial.The PM “spent a lot of time trying to persuade President Obama and others that he was serious about making peace with the Palestinians,” the NY Times wrote. “Only a hard-liner, like him, could pull it off. If only.”
The article, titled “Politics over peace,” argues that at this time it doesn’t look like Israel’s’ prime minister is willing to make the “hard choices” needed to secure a peace agreement.
“What is evident is that he has decided that mugging for his hard-line coalition is more important than working with President Obama to craft a peace deal,” the paper says.
The NY Times also slams the Netanyahu government for planning more construction in east Jerusalem. The paper says both sides to the conflict must do more, but that “the burden is on Mr. Netanyahu to get things moving again.”
To that end, the editorial urges the prime minister to extend the settlement construction freeze, arguing that “resuming the moratorium will in no way harm Israel’s security or national interest.”
U.S. offers Israel warplanes in return for new settlement freeze
Netanyahu presents security cabinet with Clinton’s incentive of 20 F-35 fighter planes and security guarantees in exchange for 90-day West Bank building moratorium.
(Haaretz) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s seven-member inner cabinet discussed Saturday an offer by the United States to reinstate a freeze on West Bank Settlement construction in return for a package of incentives.
Netanyahu presented Saturday the U.S. offer, which was discussed by Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday, to the forum of seven.
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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at their meeting in New York, November 11, 2010. |
Photo by: Reuters |
