KOBANÉ, LE PIÈGE DES RESTES EXPLOSIFS DE GUERRE

Handicap International alerte sur l’ampleur de la contamination par les armes non explosées en zones peuplées à Kobané. L’association débute la dépollution de ces engins de guerre et un projet de sensibilisation aux risques qu’ils engendrent. Elle appelle la communauté internationale à interdire l'usage des armes explosives dans les zones peuplées.

En avril dernier, les experts de Handicap International ont évalué la contamination par les restes explosifs de guerre de la ville de Kobané. Leur constat effrayant est détaillé dans un rapport sur les dommages causés par les combats dans la ville de Kobané et les villages alentours. Frédéric Maio, responsable du développement des programmes actions mines, raconte :

"Ce que nous avons vu à Kobané dépasse nos pires cauchemars : 80 % de la ville est détruite et de nombreuses armes non explosées comme des mortiers, roquettes, obus d'artillerie, bombes aériennes et engins explosifs improvisés sont présents dans les décombres. La densité des munitions en centre-ville est énorme : 10 au mètre carré. En plus, les lieux de combats regorgent encore de pièges comme des explosifs cachés dans les cadavres. Cette pollution constitue une menace quotidienne pour les civils qui tentent de rentrer chez eux. Elle les empêchera de reconstruire leur vie et rend impossible l'accès à plusieurs zones. Elle empêche aussi les organisations humanitaires de travailler et d'apporter l'aide nécessaire à cette population vulnérable."

Des mesures immédiates doivent être prises en Syrie pour protéger les civils des effets mortels ou invalidants de ces armes et pour aider les blessés. Handicap International invite la communauté internationale à reconnaitre les terribles conséquences de l'usage des armes explosives dans des zones peuplées telles que Kobané, et les Etats à s’engager dans un processus international destiné à mettre fin à ces pratiques.

L’association a entrepris des activités de sensibilisation aux risques pour protéger les civils susceptibles d’être exposés aux restes explosifs de guerre. Handicap International s’engage à apporter aux communautés de la région de Kobané son expertise en matière de recherche, de dépollution et de destruction d'armes conventionnelles et de dispositifs explosifs improvisés.

"The Siege" A Pro Palestinian play, Tron Theatre, Glasgow

An example of the regularly blinkered and biased views expressed in The Herald. I wonder just how many people have seen this “play” and would wish to concur with the reviewer.

 “A microcosm for how the city beyond the church's consecrated ground is similarly besieged by oppressive forces”.

Here are the set of photos of Pro Israeli Supporters that I took at The Siege in Glasgow on Wednesday evening; they are in a Dropbox folder:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3fob3jr989r1gn7/AACtIp8wcng20odSzfrTlLBpa?dl=0

They are full high resolution jpgs - one a panoramic of the vigil 'line-up' which is extra large as it is three photos stitched together. I hope they're of sufficient quality for use in your media outlets.

Renaud Sarda

Jewish Media Agency and Member of 

Scottish Friends of Israel

Theatre review: Pro Palestinian Play  "The Siege", Tron Theatre, Glasgow

http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/stage/theatre-review-the-siege-tron-theatre-glasgow.129369942

 

Keith Bruce

Arts Editor

Thursday 18 June 2015 

Theatre

The Siege, Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Neil Cooper

Three stars

Bethlehem is a holy place. This is something the Church of the Nativity's tour guide makes clear when he steps from the audience in the Palestine refugee camp based Freedom Theatre's production of Nabil Al-Raee's new play, created and directed with Zoe Lafferty, which closes its UK tour at the Tron this week. But it can be other things too. It is in the church's confines, after all, where a group of machine-gun wielding young men seek sanctuary from a hostile Israeli army intent on desecration of a different kind.

Inside, amidst sporadic bursts of gunfire, the men noisily hold their own alongside a smattering of priests, nuns and others caught in the cross-fire of a very unholy war. As the men settle in for the long haul, tensions rise and fall, with a sense of solidarity coming from gallows humour as much as the soul-sapping fatalities and concerns beyond themselves that eventually sees them acquiesce to their captors and the exile that follows.

Based on real events in 2002 seen here on film and developed from interviews with its survivors, Al-Raee and Lafferty's creation becomes a microcosm for how the city beyond the church's consecrated ground is similarly besieged by oppressive forces. As performed by an all male cast of six, there is an impassioned partisan rawness to what follows, as we flit between the siege itself and the men's lives afterwards far from their homeland. The latter is told simply and directly without contrition, and when the tour guide takes a selfie with the audience, it's as if the entire world is captured in its light.

Suspected Mastermind Of 1982 Paris Jewish Restaurant Attack Arrested

(AFP). The suspected mastermind of an attack on a Paris Jewish restaurant in 1982 that left six people dead and 22 injured has been arrested in Jordan, a source close to the case said Wednesday.

Zuhair Mohamad Hassan Khalid al-Abassi, alias “Amjad Atta”, was one of three men for whom France issued an international arrest warrant earlier this year.

Overall, between three and five men are thought to have taken part in the attack, which was blamed on the Abu Nidal Organisation, a Palestinian militant group.

The other two main suspects in the 1982 attack have been named as Mahmoud Khader Abed Adra, alias “Hicham Harb”, who lives in Ramallah in the West Bank, and Walid Abdulrahman Abu Zayed, alias “Souhail Othman”, a resident of Norway.

The Abu Nidal Organisation, officially known as the Fatah-Revolutionary Council, was considered one of the most ruthless of the Palestinian militant groups.

“Amjad Atta” is thought to have been the number three in the group’s “special operations committee”.

The attack on the Chez Jo Goldenberg restaurant, a busy eaterie in the Marais district, a popular largely Jewish neighbourhood in the centre of Paris, began around midday on August 9, 1982 when a grenade was thrown into the dining room.

Two men then entered the restaurant, which had around 50 customers inside, and opened fire with “WZ-63″ Polish-made machine guns.

They also shot at passers-by as they escaped down the street. The whole incident lasted only a few minutes.

The investigation has made little progress over the years. One of the few pieces of evidence was one of the guns, found in the Bois de Boulogne park on the western edge of Paris shortly after the attack.

At the time, France often suffered the spillover from the conflict in the Middle East, with numerous clashes involving Arabs and Jews on its soil.

Two years prior to the Goldenberg attack, a bomb exploded outside a Paris synagogue, killing four and wounding around 20.

And more than thirty years later, the French capital would again be rocked by an anti-Semitic attack, as jihadist gunmen took hostages at a Jewish supermarket and killed four — part of the Charlie Hebdo attacks that left 17 dead in total.

Young Indian Jews Participating on Birthright Trips Steadily Increases

Since 2001, Israel has seen an increase in the amount of Indian Jews that are visiting the Jewish state each year.

The Indian city of Mumbai, where a majority of Jews reside in the country, is home to 4,000 Jews, according to J Space News.

From June 5-14, 22 young Indian Jews visited Israel on a free Taglit-Birthright trip to travel the Jewish state and meet with Israelis.

“It was an amazing trip,” said Adina Tambde, 21, from Mumbai in an interview with Tazpit News Agency. “I didn’t feel like a tourist here; I felt very at home. Israel is very welcoming,” she told Tazpit. “The moment when we first landed was very special.”

In India this is a highly respected community and the culture is embraced to the best of their abilities, but the balance between the two traditions often proves to be difficult. So it’s no wonder the participants were happy to find kosher food everywhere.

“It’s easier to keep kosher here – you can eat almost anywhere,” Tambde said. “Although 10 days, without spicy food was a bit hard,” she joked.

Tambde recently completed her college studies in business in Mumbai and is currently exploring options to pursue her master’s degree in Israel. “In India, people admire you for being Jewish and it’s safe for Jews there,” she says. “But it’s difficult to fully follow Judaism and traditions too.”

The group traveled to several parts of the country, including Tiberias, Golan Heights, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem,Yad Vashem, and an Indian spice shop in the Ramle market.

The first Taglit-Birthright trip for Indian Jews started with 12 participants in 2001. It has grown to 40 people in some years, and 32 members taking part in the trip in 2014.

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Israel's First Single Malt Whiskey

Israel produces many wonderful things. It is a leader in high-tech and medical innovations. The land yields a bounty of fruits and vegetables, and the country is quickly retaking its place as a producer of amazing wine. David Zibell, a new arrival to the Golan, would like to see Israel become a leader in single malt whiskeys. He has already begun distilling, but, even though he is the first single malt made in Israel, you will still have to wait 3 years to taste the proof.

I sat with him recently, cigar and snifter in hand, as he introduced me to the heady aromas and textured smells of the beverage he is so passionate about.

I am totally ignorant so please tell me, what is single malt, and how is it different than regular whiskey?

Single malt is whiskey distilled by one distillery, using one kind of malted grain, usually barley. Whiskey that isn’t single malt is usually made from blends of different whiskeys that can come from several different distilleries.

How long does it take to make?

It’s a fairly simple process, taking just a few days. But aging in the barrels is a minimum of 3 years. Right now, we are distilling 225 – 450 liters a week, which is 1-2 barrels. During the aging, it evaporates in the barrels and it goes down to 150 liters in each barrel after 3 years. You can age it longer, but then even more evaporates. It ages quickly in the Israel climate. If I bottle it at cask strength, that would be 215 bottles per barrel. But it is better at 46% which gives about 280 bottles.

Did you learn from anyone how to do this?

I recently toured Scotland. They were very nice people. It made me realize how much I wanted to do this and how possible it is. They’ve kept the original process. It’s very simple, not complicated at all. The process is very basic and that leaves you with a wide range of what you can do.  I’m trying to create own style, not specifically like any other whiskey. I am using local barrels from the winery, and am leaving it unfiltered, distilling it with the grain, making it more full flavored.

Are you doing anything else besides single malt?

My single malt will be called Ashtarot, but I’ll also be making a 100% rye whiskey called Hermon, and a corn whiskey called Bashan.

I see from your website that you also make absinthe.

Yes. I am originally from Paris, though I lived in Montreal my whole life. I began making absinthe and then I found out my great great grandmother used to have an absinthe bar in northern France, until absinthe became illegal in 1915. My great great grandfather used to hunt and fish at night, what you might call poaching. One night, he fell through the ice in the North Sea and drowned. My great great grandmother had to make a living so she opened up an absinthe bar and brewed her own absinthe.

Is that the recipe you use?

No. I use a more original recipe from around 1855. I still have an original spoon she used for serving the liquor and am having others made like it.

When people think of single malt, they usually think of Scotland. Why did you come to Israel and jump right into this?

We came to visit the Golan and I saw the area was ideal. There is an abundance of natural spring water and the climate is ideal.

David is trying to raise money through crowd funding. He prefers to use this method, rather than through investors. He doesn’t want the pressure of giving an increasing return on money, preferring to remain focused on making the best whiskey he can make for the next three years. People who participate in the campaign will receive vouchers for bottles of the product of their choice.

If you are interested, you can visit his Indiegogo site. If you would like to hear the story of Israel’s first single malt from David, he was recently interviewed on Voice of Israel.

Seventy Years After Holocaust, Germany A Destination For Rabbinical Students

By Elisabeth Braw 

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WATCH: Israeli student Amnon Selig is studying to become a cantor at the Abraham Geiger College in Berlin. Singing in the college's synagogue, Selig is accompanied by Russian student Natalya Verzhebovska.

BERLIN -- Two years ago, Maciej Kirschenbaum decided that he wanted to become a rabbi. And if the young Pole's career choice was unusual, his choice of a place to train was even more so: Germany.

"I'm European, so I wanted to train at a rabbinical seminary in Europe, not the United States or Israel," Kirschenbaum tells RFE/RL. "Some people may say, 'Germany is a country of perpetrators,' but that doesn't convince me. That's exactly why you have to come here and help rebuild Jewish life."

There is, in fact, a lot of rebuilding going on.

Since 1990, some 220,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union have moved to Germany, multiplying its 1990 Jewish population of around 30,000, and about 100,000 people are active in Jewish congregations.

The sharp increase has brought Germany's Jewish population to about half of what it was before the Holocaust. A census conducted in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, put it at 500,000.

"A hundred years ago this country was full of synagogues," notes Sarah Serebrinski, director of the Berliner Rabbinerseminar, an Orthodox Jewish seminary. "Now that's coming back."

The Rabbinerseminar is a case in point: It belongs to a 100-year-old synagogue that was converted into a cosmetics factory during the Cold War, when it was in East Berlin -- part of communist East Germany -- and has been returned to its original purpose.

Rabbis Needed, Badly

There's just one problem: There aren't enough rabbis.

"There's a huge demand for rabbis here because most of the recently arrived Jews don't know much about Judaism," says Benjamin Kochan, a 26-year-old from the Russian city of Yaroslavl, some 250 kilometers northeast of Moscow.

"I understand their situation, because I used to be like that myself. In Russia, my family knew nothing about what it means to be Jewish. That only happened after we moved to Germany," adds Kochan, who is now studying at the Rabbinerseminar.

"Our students grew up in the former Soviet Union," Rabbi Moishe Halpern, the seminary's spiritual leader, says. "They're Jewish, but before coming to Germany they didn't read Hebrew!" 

Abraham Geiger College students Natalya Verzhebovska (left to right), Max Feldhake, Anita Kantor, Amnon Selig, and Maciej Kirschenbaum

The six-year-old Rabbinerseminar recently graduated its first students, and on a morning this month, its current crop of 11 were conducting a class, conversing in Hebrew, Russian, English, and German. In the wardrobe outside, they had parked their black coats and distinctive wide-brimmed black hats.

"I want to help Judaism play a role in people's lives," says Shlomo Sajatz, a student born in the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk. "Jewish life should be more than something they know from the movies."

After World War II, no rabbis were trained in Germany: there were no seminaries. That changed in 1999, when the liberal Abraham Geiger College became continental Europe's first new rabbi and cantor seminary since the Holocaust. It has since graduated 31 rabbis.

This academic year, Abraham Geiger College was joined by the conservative Zacharias Frankel College. Both seminaries, part of the University of Potsdam just outside Berlin, also offer academic degree courses.

"It's great to be able to get my training here," says Sonja Pilz, an Abraham Geiger College rabbinical student. "Twenty years ago, I'd have had to go abroad." Pilz, one of the college's few German students, is also about to complete her PhD in Jewish studies there.

Students Supported, Rabbis Not So Much

People are coming here from all over the world. The student body at the Abraham Geiger College includes Russians, Hungarians, Poles, Americans, and Israelis, among others. At the Rabbinerseminar, Serebrinski reports receiving inquiries from prospective students in Britain, for decades a destination for rabbis-in-training.

"German Jewish culture was very vibrant," says Amnon Selig, a fifth-year Israeli cantor student here. "Their cantors composed music and adapted music to the synagogue. Right now there aren't many jobs for cantors, but everything is being built up. I've made the conscious decision to move here and stay."

Finances add to the German seminaries’ attractiveness. The German government underwrites the Abraham Geiger and Zacharias Frankel colleges, and the Rabbinerseminar receives funding from both the state and private donors, including the U.S.-based Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. Many students do not have to pay for accommodation.

"There aren't that many seminaries, and there are even fewer ones for women, so Germany is a good opportunity", says Natalya Verzhebovska, a Muscovite who's studying for the rabbinate at Abraham Geiger College. "And liberal Judaism originated in Germany."

But for Sonja Pilz, financial reality beckons when she's ordained on August 31. With Jewish congregations still building themselves up, most can't afford a full-time rabbi, and many clerics have to combine several congregations or have a secular job on the side. "One works as a tax adviser," she says. And many of the students don't intend to stay in Germany. Four Abraham Geiger graduates now serve congregations in South Africa.

Seventy years after the Holocaust, Germany is not immune from the anti-Semitism seen elsewhere in Europe.

But Anita Kantor, an Abraham Geiger student from Budapest, says that being a foreign-born rabbinical student in Germany is in fact an advantage. "My job is to answer questions and make people comfortable with us," she says.

William Wolff, a Berlin-born Jew who left for Britain with his parents in 1933 and had a long career as a newspaperman there, says that "Germany today is Europe's most Jewish-friendly country." He now serves as a liberal rabbi in his native country.

Max Feldhake, an Abraham Geiger student from Phoenix, Arizona, says his experience has been positive. "I walk through Dresden and Berlin wearing a kippa," he says. "Nothing has ever happened to me."

What Does the Magna Carta's Legacy Have to Do with Today's Judaism?

June 15, ,is one of the most well-known days in Western history. 800 years ago today, in Runnymede, England, King John signed Magna Carta (the Great Charter), a nascent constitution/bill of rights for English nobility. Magna Carta maintains an almost legendary role in history, although only three of its many provisions are currently in use in English law today, and it has been changed and reissued numerous times since 1215.

I first learned about Magna Carta in sixth grade, when my interest in political history and theory was already emerging. I loved the idea that our sense of law and fairness in society – through government and its institutions – could be traced back so many hundreds of years. It was not until I was a freshman in college, and selected my freshman writing seminar on Magna Carta, that I learned about the somewhat fabricated history of this early constitution and how its story is much more complex and convoluted than many textbooks would lead you to believe.

This, however, does not diminish Magna Carta’s importance in history, nor my keen interest and care for it. That Americans look back to this medieval British document of compromise between a king and a frustrated nobility as a charter of rights preceding our Constitution in the history of lawmaking – from the Biblical period, to Hammurabi, to the generation of Washington and Jefferson – is pretty incredible. Some even look at Magna Carta and its clauses on the freedom of the pre-Reformation Church of England as the beginnings of Western constitutional religious freedom rights.

That legacy – of a kind of religious freedom in a theocratic kingdom – is, at least for me, somewhat ambiguous. What is clear, however, is that when other rights are expanded and granted, so is religious freedom. 500 years later, the American Constitution might have the most straightforward, longest lasting Bill of Rights related to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, of press, of assembly, and many more, but understanding the journey from the Middle Ages to today illustrates the importance of keeping history alive.

Living history is a unique facet of Judaism and Jewish life. We have ancient texts and laws; we also have thousands of years of interpretations, writing and debates that have revived and reenvisioned Judaism over the ages. Ultimately, we live in a middle plane of giving life to the values that are derived from the stories and laws that shape our tradition, and living in our modern times always knowing where we come from.

The line between Magna Carta and the American Constitution reflects something familiar, though not exact as between ancient Judaism and the Judaism we live today. We can use this anniversary to think together about much the idea that freedoms must be enshrined in law has progressed. Jewish tradition teaches that we are all created b’tzelem Elohim, that we are all created in the image of the Divine; we know that every person deserves to be treated with the same dignity and respect, which includes the right to practice their faith – or not to practice faith – as they choose. While we do not need a constitution to know that eternal truth, the Jewish experience teaches us that we are protected by and we can flourish by the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment, as are all people in the United States.

As we think about Magna Carta today, let us keep in mind all the people in the world who do not know the freedoms that this document symbolizes for so many – the freedom to live life as you choose, to be in positive relationship with government, to be free to believe and practice religion as you choose. Until we all know this kind of freedom, our struggle continues on. Eight hundred years from now, I hope that our descendants have been living in a world like this – for many hundreds of years.

About the Author

Sarah Greenberg is the Senior Legislative Assistant at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, where she was an Eisendrath Legislative Assistant in 2013-2014. Sarah graduated in 2013 from Cornell University, and is originally from New York City, where her family is a member of Central Synagogue.