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Newsletter : 2fax0117.txt
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>JN Jan. 17, 2002, Vol. 10, No. 11
Peres Orders Iranian 'Black Book'
By IsraelNationalNews.com
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres has ordered Foreign Ministry officials to prepare a "black book" to be disseminated worldwide, documenting the Iranian threat against Israel.
The book will include public statements, threats made against Israel as well as documentation of ongoing efforts to achieve nuclear capability.
Arafat Under Fire for Arresting Militant Leader
By VOA News
Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat is under attack from all sides for his arrest of the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Radical Palestinian groups condemned the arrest as a dangerous development and said it puts the Palestinian Authority in confrontation with all nationalist and Islamist factions. Demonstrators in several Palestinian towns protested the arrest. Israeli officials, meanwhile, dismissed Arafat's action as a fake arrest and said he could not be believed.
Palestinian police arrested PFLP leader Ahmed Saadat on Tuesday in the West Bank town of Ramallah. Israel has been demanding action against the group for its assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi in October. Israel is preventing Arafat from leaving Ramallah until he arrests other suspects in the killing.
In further violence Wednesday, an Arab resident of Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem was found shot dead in the West Bank. Police speculated that he was attacked because his car had Israeli license plates. Two Jewish settlers were shot dead in the West Bank Tuesday.
Russians are Investigating Anti-Semitism in Siberia
By Rebecca Santana (VOA-Moscow)
Russian prosecutors are investigating a case of alleged anti-Semitism involving a Russian Orthodox church in the Siberian Ural city of Yekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk). This is one of the first times the state church has been investigated for possible anti-Semitic activity.
Prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into the sale of what Jewish groups describe as anti-Semitic material in Yekaterinburg. The case was opened last month after 16 non-governmental organizations in the Yekaterinburg area complained that the Orthodox Church was selling anti-Semitic texts in church bookstores.
Specifically they objected to the sale of a book called "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Jewish leaders say the book attacks Jews, calling them the anti-Christ and enemies of Christianity.
The book first appeared in 1903 and is about alleged Jewish plans to overthrow Christianity. The book was proved to be a forgery in 1921 but was used by Nazi Germany to justify persecution of the Jews.
Jewish leaders in Yekaterinburg said they complained for months to local officials but with no success. Then Mikhail Oshtrakh, who heads a Jewish organization in Yekaterinburg, went to Moscow for a meeting at the Kremlin with government officials and non-governmental organizations from throughout Russia. He spoke with officials about the sale of alleged anti-Semitic material in the Orthodox Church.
A few weeks later, prosecutors in Yekaterinburg opened a criminal investigation into whether the Orthodox Church had violated a law against inciting religious hatred.
Church officials from Yekaterinburg have rejected the charges, saying they are not anti-Semitic and the book does not incite religious hatred. No one has been charged in the case and Oshtrakh doubts that anyone will be. However, he said he was pleased that local officials are investigating the case.
Return To Ellis Island
By Rochelle Zaltzman (Courtesy of The Jewish Week)
Every American Jew I know has a relative that first set foot in the States on Ellis Island. So I was naturally intrigued by an invitation to a recent opening of the American Family Immigration History Center on the famous old landmark.
Arriving at the Battery Park dock in New York Harbor to board the ferry for Ellis Island, we were given huge numbered tags on a string and asked to wear them around our neck, just as the original immigrants were told to do upon their arrival.
Polls in America tell us that over 60 percent of Americans are now interested in family history research. The Center features an electronic database containing valuable information on 22 million immigrants (of all nationalities) passengers and crew-members who entered the United States through the Port of New York between 1892-1924, the peak years of Ellis Island's processing. This data, taken from microfilms of the ship's passenger manifests provided by the National Archives and Records Administration, has never before been available electronically. It was extracted and transcribed through the efforts of 12,000 members of the Latter-day Saints (Mormons) who volunteered five million hours to this project, by reviewing and entering data on 22 million individuals taken from 3,678 boxes of microfilmed manifests.
If you've had relatives the emigrated to the colonies between l893-l924 and you're interested in tracking their history, email the American Family Immigration History Center at historycenter@ellisisland.org
(c) The Jewish Week 2002
