Tag: judaism

Antisemitic Attack in Britain Sees Jewish Community Ambulances Set on Fire in Front of London Synagogue

Jewish community under pressure from UK extremists.

Failing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer tried to stay out of the military operations in Iran – but the conflict came up to him.

Today, four Jewish community ambulances in front of a synagogue in ​north London were set on fire in what Starmer is calling ‘a deeply shocking antisemitic arson attack’.

Why not call it terrorism and be done with it?

Reuters reported:

“The London Fire Brigade ‌said multiple cylinders on the vehicles exploded, shattering nearby windows. No injuries were reported and no arrests have been made.

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The SITE Intelligence website said an Iran-aligned multinational militant collective called Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand had claimed responsibility for the attack near a synagogue in Golders Green.”

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Belgium deploys soldiers to reinforce security at Jewish sites

Soldiers were deployed on the streets of leading Belgian cities on Monday to bolster security for the Jewish ​community, after what officials said were antisemitic attacks in ‌Belgium and the Netherlands.

The move follows an explosion this month at a synagogue in Liege that authorities called an antisemitic act.

“From today we’re putting soldiers back ​on the streets in Brussels and Antwerp because safety ​is a basic right,” Belgian Defence Minister Theo Francken ⁠said in a post on X on Monday.

The deployment, in ​collaboration with federal police, will provide security at Jewish sites including ​synagogues and schools, Belgian authorities said in a press release last week.

Antwerp “is again a little safer….. the Jewish community too. We say NO to ​antisemitism!” Francken said on Monday.

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Expelled Oberlin Chabad rabbi says he ‘made a mistake’ with explicit social media chats

A police report obtained by the Forward sheds light on the removal of a Chabad rabbi from the campus of Oberlin College last week, after the school administration became aware of a police report that alleged he engaged in sexually explicit conversations online concerning minors.

Rabbi Scott “Shlomo” Elkan, former co-director of Oberlin Chabad, allegedly received sexually explicit texts, photos and videos through the messaging app Kik concerning three young people, ages 7, 12 and 13, according to the report.

In December 2025 messages to an adult on the platform, Elkan allegedly responded to photos of someone giving a child a bath. The person he chatted with alluded to touching the child’s genitals and said he had been aroused when the child was sitting on his lap, the report stated.

According to the Oberlin Police Department report, Elkan shared photos of girls as part of the chat. The department closed the case after a 20-day investigation, with no charges filed.

In a phone interview with the Forward, Elkan said he regretted his participation in the chat, but that his messages were not based on real events.

“To be clear, what had happened was an online chat with an anonymous adult on purely fictional, you know, fantastical things that’s not rooted in any kind of reality whatsoever,” Elkan said. “And I entered that, and I should not have, and I take responsibility for that.”

Elkan added that he has been engaged in “professional care and spiritual counseling to deal with all of the stresses and all of the factors that led me to engaging in an unhealthy behavior.”

According to the report, in an interview with police, Elkan confirmed the Kik account belonged to him and said the chats were “escapism” from the stress of his everyday life. He denied ever viewing or possessing child sexual abuse images.

Elkan told the Forward that “oftentimes people think of rabbis as godlike and infallible,” and he “made a mistake in one of the weakest few moments of my life.”

“There was no crime. Nothing illegal. Poor judgment, yes,” Elkan said. “And there’s not a victim. The victims here are the Jewish community and my family.”

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Israel confirms Michigan synagogue attacker’s brother was Hezbollah terrorist commander

The brother of a terrorist who rammed a vehicle into a Michigan Jewish preschool was a Hezbollah commander, Israel Defense Forces have said.

Ayman Muhammad Ghazali, 41, was shot dead after driving the vehicle into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., on Thursday.

His brother, Ibrahim Muhammad Ghazali, was responsible for managing weapons operations within a specialized branch of Hezbollah’s Badr Unit, the IDF said in a statement Sunday morning.

This unit of the Lebanese terror group is responsible for launching hundreds of rockets toward Israeli civilians throughout the recent war with Iran, the IDF said.

Ghazali’s two brothers, a niece, and a nephew were killed in an Israeli airstrike on March 5 in the town of Mashgharah, Lebanon, just days before the attack, a local official told AP Friday.

The family had sat down for their fast-breaking meal during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan when they were struck.

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Report: Michigan Synagogue Attacker a Lebanese National

The West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, Temple Israel attacker is identified as a Lebanese national, according to reporting by FOX News’s Bill Melugin.

Breitbart News reported that the attacker drove into the Temple Israel building Thursday and was engaged by security and killed. The attacker’s vehicle was registered to a Dearborn, Michigan, resident from Lebanon.

Melugin is now reporting that “DHS confirms to FOX News that the Michigan synagogue attacker has been ID’d as Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a Lebanese national who first entered the U.S. in 2011 on an IR1 immigrant visa as the spouse of a U.S. citizen.”

He noted that Ghazali “was naturalized into a U.S. citizen in 2016 during the Obama administration.”

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U.S.-born rabbi called ‘extremist,’ kicked out of Russia

For the eighth time this past decade, Russian authorities told a foreign Chabad rabbi living in Russia to leave the country.Josef Marozof, a New York-born rabbi who began working 12 years ago for Chabad in the city of Ulyanovsk 400 miles east of Moscow, was ordered earlier this week to leave because the FSB security service said he had been involved in unspecified “extremist behavior.”Marozof appealed the decision in a supreme court but his appeal was denied Saturday, the news site Jewish.ru reported Tuesday. He, his wife and six children, who were all born in Russia, have left for the United States.Marozof had a residence permit well into 2021 but it had been revoked over the charges, which he denied and asked they be made public so he could challenge them. The court declined to order the FSB to specify the charges.Last year, a court in Krasnodar ordered the deportation of Ari Edelkopf, who had been working as Chabad’s emissary to the city of Sochi, on grounds that he was a threat to national security. Edelkopf’s appeal against the unspecified charge, which he denied, were dismissed.Chabad of Russia, which enjoys friendly relations with President Vladimir Putin, strongly protested Edelkopf’s expulsion, which the movement said was disconcerting because of the allegation that he endangers state security.Behind the expulsion of Edelkopf and the other rabbis, according to Boruch Gorin, a senior aide to Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar, is an attempt by the state to limit the number of foreign clerics living in Russia – an effort that has led to expulsions not only of rabbis but also of imams and Protestant priests.“It’s not targeting the Jews,” he said. Rather, Jews are “collateral damage” in this broader effort.

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Three-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jewish children told ‘the non-Jews’ are ‘evil’ in worksheet produced by London school

British three-year-olds have been told “the non-Jews” are “evil” in a Kindergarten worksheet handed out at ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools in north London, it can be revealed.

Documents seen by The Independent show children are taught about the horrors of the Holocaust when they are still in kindergarten at the Beis Rochel boys’ school in north London.

A whistle-blower, who wished to remain anonymous, has shown The Independent a worksheet given to boys aged three and four at the school. In it, children were asked to complete questions related to the holiday of 21 Kislev, observed by Satmer Jews as the day its founder and holy Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, escaped the Nazis.

The document refers to Nazis only as “goyim” – a term for non-Jews some people argue is offensive.

Emily Green, who used to teach at the same Beis Rochel girls’ secondary school, now chairs the Gesher EU organisation which supports ultra-Orthodox Jews who want to leave the community.

“It’s not uncommon to be taught non-Jewish people are evil in ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools. It is part of the prayers, teaching, their whole ethos,” she said.

Describing it as a form of “indoctrination”, Ms Green added: “Psychologically, you become so afraid of the world out there after being taught how dangerous and bad and evil non-Jews are, that it makes it harder to leave.”

Independently translated from Yiddish for The Independent, the worksheet’s first question reads: “What have the evil goyim (non-Jews) done with the synagogues and cheders [Jewish primary schools]?” The answer in the completed worksheet reads: “Burned them.”

Another question asks: “What did the goyim want to do with all the Jews?” – to which the answer, according to the worksheet, is: “Kill them.”.

“It doesn’t explicitly refer to the Holocaust,” the source said. “It’s a document that teaches very young children to be very afraid and treat non-Jews very suspiciously because of what they did to us in the past.

“It’s not a history lesson – you can’t say that. It’s a parable that is actively teaching the children extremism, hatred and a fear for the outside world.”

A spokesperson for Beis Rochel said that the worksheets would be amended and apologised for any offence. However they argued the phrase “goyim” was not offensive and accusations that they were indoctrinating children were “without basis”. “The language we used was not in any way intended to cause offence, now this has been brought to our attention, we will endeavour to use more precise language in the future.”

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TikTok CEO Reveals Coordination With 2 Dozen Jewish Groups to Police Speech

A chilling blueprint for the censorship of pro-Palestine voices on social media has been exposed, directly from the mouth of a top tech executive. Adam Presser, the newly installed CEO of TikTok’s U.S. operations following its forced sale to a consortium led by billionaire Larry Ellison, detailed in a recent resurfaced video how the platform systematically silenced critics by labeling their speech as hateful. This admission confirms the worst fears of free speech advocates and reveals a coordinated effort to shield Israeli government actions from public scrutiny by conflating political criticism with bigotry.

The video, originally presented to the World Jewish Congress, features Presser, who was then TikTok’s Head of Operations and Trust & Safety, outlining specific policy changes. “We made a change to designate the use of the term Zionist as a proxy for a protected attribute as hate speech,” Presser stated. In practice, this means using “Zionist” in a negative context could get a user banned, while phrases like “proud Zionist” remain permitted. This creates a politically motivated double standard where one side of a heated geopolitical debate is granted linguistic immunity.

A tripling of bans and outside influence

Presser boasted of aggressive enforcement, revealing that TikTok “tripled the amount of accounts that we were banning for hateful activity” over the course of 2024. This timeline coincides directly with the global outcry following Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. He further explained that “over two dozen Jewish organizations” are “constantly feeding us intelligence and information when they spot violative trends,” and that these groups help inform TikTok on “what is hate speech.” This outsourcing of content moderation decisions to explicitly partisan advocates strips away any pretense of neutrality, effectively allowing pro-Israel groups to police and silence their critics on a global platform.

The consequences of this policy are not theoretical. Award-winning Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda, who had built an audience of 1.4 million followers on TikTok while documenting the war from Gaza, recently found her account permanently banned. In a video, Owda connected her ban directly to Presser’s remarks and to comments from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who last year called the TikTok purchase “consequential” and stated, “We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield in which we engage, and the most important ones are social media.”

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Sending army to protect Sydney’s Jewish community not ruled out by NSW premier

Deploying the army to Jewish areas to protect the community has not been ruled out by the NSW premier as he contemplates security changes following the Bondi Beach terrorist attack. 

At a press conference on Sunday, Chris Minns also warned that Sydneysiders could expect to see more police officers carrying long-armed guns before and beyond New Year’s Eve.

Mr Minns said that “nothing was off the table” in response to a question about the deployment of troops, confirming that discussions about it were ongoing.

“We’re going to look very closely at security programs and measures in the future. We have to do things completely differently,” he said.

“The situation as it currently stands, it can’t continue … there’s a big challenge ahead of us to rebuild Jewish life in Sydney. So I’m not going to take anything off the table.

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Colombia says 17 minors rescued from Jewish cult Lev Tahor amid abuse allegations

Colombian authorities said Sunday they had rescued 17 minors from Lev Tahor, an extremist ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect under investigation for alleged child sex abuse.

“We have rescued 17 boys, girls and teens,” the country’s immigration service said on X, posting pictures of some of the children with their faces blurred or shielded from view.

Five of the minors rescued were identified as missing persons whom Interpol had issued “yellow notices” to find, authorities said.

Founded in Jerusalem in the 1980s, Lev Tahor — literally, “pure heart” in Hebrew — has been dogged by allegations of child abuse for years, and Israel and others have called it a cult. Its leader is in prison for kidnapping children.

A group called Lev Tahor Survivors has estimated the sect’s membership at several hundred people and says it is led by a core cohort, with the rest being held mostly against their will.

The group adheres to an extreme, idiosyncratic interpretation of Judaism and kosher dietary laws that largely shields members from the outside world.

Women and girls above the age of 3 are required to dress in black robes that completely cover their bodies, leading some to call the group the “Jewish Taliban.” The men spend most of their days in prayer and studying specific portions of the Torah.

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