The Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks this week called for community-wide support to challenge a court judgment which he said has effectively branded Judaism as “racist”. Centre Court jew: my day in the spotlight The reclusive Jewish author J D Salinger has won a battle to stop a sequel to his novel The Catcher in the Rye from being published. The author of the sequel, Swedish writer Frederick Colting, has said the ruling is tantamount to censorship. The sequel, 60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye, written under the pen name John David California, has already gone on sale in the UK. The book features the hero of the novel, Holden Caulfield, escaping from an residential home when aged 76 and includes numerous other characters in the book. Parts of the Gusen 2 Concentration Camp in Austria, almost forgotten for 64 years, are being turned into a residential development, and a former underground slave-labour factory is being filled in, local residents claim. Tens of thousands of prisoners toiled and died in the vast underground caverns, building jet planes for the Luftwaffe. The site has remained sealed since the camp’s liberation, but redevelopment work recently began. A new body has been set up to oversee the work of the Holocaust Era Assets Conference, which restores Shoah assets to their owners. The European Shoah Legacy Institute will act as a forum for those representing Holocaust survivors and other victims of the Nazis. It will also be involved in the fight against racism, xenophobia and antisemitism in Europe and worldwide. Veteran peace negotiator Dennis Ross is back in the US government’s Middle East portfolio in a move many interpret as a shift to the right for the administration. After serving as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top adviser on Iran, Mr Ross is moving to the National Security Council (NSC), where he will be special adviser to the president on the Middle East, including Iraq, Iran and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Mr Ross is considered to have close ties with Israeli officials. He previously chaired the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. Michael Jackson’s life was full of contradictions, and his relationship to Jews and the Jewish community was no exception. This was the man who asked to be allowed to visit the Museum of Tolerance and its Holocaust exhibit one week before its Los Angeles opening in February 1993. Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the museum, took Jackson on a two-hour tour ending with the vivid exhibit on the Final Solution. The German government has been asked to open an investigation into the workings of the far-right LaRouche group. Jeremiah Duggan was found dead on a highway in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 2003, while attending a LaRouche youth event. The student’s parents have presented the German Embassy in London with a dossier detailing the group’s antisemitic links. This week, Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies, joined Erica and Hugo Duggan at a meeting at the embassy with Germany’s deputy ambassador, Dr Eckard Lubkemier. The National Court in Spain has dropped a war crimes investigation into an air attack by the Israel Defence Forces on a Hamas target in Gaza in July 2002. Saleh Shehadeh, a leading militant of Hamas was killed when the Israeli Air Force bombed his Gaza home in an explosion which killed 14 other people, mostly women and children. Spanish Judge Fernando Andreu argued the bombing was a crime against humanity and the case had caused some diplomatic tension between Spain and Israel. Michael Jackson’s life was full of contradictions and his relationship to Jews and the Jewish community was no exception. This was the man who asked to be allowed to visit the Museum of Tolerance and its Holocaust exhibit one week before its Los Angeles opening in February 1993. Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the museum, took Jackson on a two-hour tour ending with the vivid exhibit on the Final Solution. “When he left, Michael was crying, and he wrote me afterwards that he cried for weeks,” Rabbi Hier recalled. The wife of convicted fraudster Bernard Madoff's says she feels "betrayed and confused" by the actions of her husband. Ruth Madoff has said, in her first public statement: "I am breaking my silence now, because my reluctance to speak has been interpreted as indifference or lack of sympathy for the victims of my husband Bernie’s crime, which is exactly the opposite of the truth. She added: “The man who committed his horrible fraud is not the man whom I have known for all these years." A lawyer who won reparations for Holocaust survivors in the 1990s was disbarred in New Jersey after he swindled some of the very survivors he helped. The New Jersey Supreme Court found that Edward Fagan had taken $350,000 from the accounts of survivors Gizela Weisshaus, Estelle Sapir and others without their permission to pay his bills. The court also reportedly froze his assets. Fagan also was disbarred last year in New York on an unrelated case.
JFS: What's next?
World news
Catcher author wins ban on sequel
Austrian death camp to be ‘filled with trash’
New rights body for survivors
Can Dennis Ross bring Israel and US closer?
Michael Jackson and the Jews
Jeremiah Duggan parents demand new probe
Spain drops Israeli war crimes probe
Michael Jackson and the Shabbat dinners
Madoff wife 'betrayed and confused' by husband
Holocaust hero lawyer struck off
Friday 3 July 2009
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