The University of Bologna in Italy has found what it says may be the oldest complete scroll of Judaism’s most important text, the Torah.
The scroll was in the university library but had been mislabelled, a professor at the university says.
It was previously thought the scroll was no more that a few hundred years old.
However, after carbon dating tests, the university has said the text may have been written more than 850 years ago.
The university’s Professor of Hebrew Mauro Perani says this would make it the oldest complete text of the Torah known to exist, and an object of extraordinary worth.
The university says that in 1889 one of its librarians, Leonello Modona, had examined the scroll and dated it to the 17th century.
However, when Prof Perani recently re-examined the scroll, he realised the script used was that of the oriental Babylonian tradition, meaning that the scroll must be extremely old.
Another reason for the dating is that the text has many features forbidden in later copies under rules laid down by the scholar Maimonides in the 12th Century, the university says.
Protests at the Western Wall in Jerusalem opposing the Women of the Wall prayer group ended on Friday morning with the arrest of three haredi men suspected of disturbing the peace, as well as two police officers who suffered light injuries and were treated at the scene. A large number of security forces were at the holy site, attempting to create a human barrier between the men and women‘s sections.
Haredi protesters threw water bottles and other objects and shouted insults at the Women of the Wall activists, according to Israel Radio.
Rabbi Susan Silverman, comedian Sarah Silverman‘s sister who prays with the Women of the Wall, was at the protest where she said that haredi men spit globs of spit on her three daughters. she told The Jerusalem Post. Silverman also said that the haredim threw coffee at the Women of the Wall activists and that a little girl next to her was hit in the head with something hard.
Silverman told the Post that the haredi protesters represent “A fundamentalism and a belief in a single and very narrow view of god that I believe is idolatrous.”
Women of the Wall Spokesperson, Oshrat Ben Shimshon told Israel Radio, “Orthodox rabbis have determined that there is no halachik barrier to women praying with prayer shawls and tefillin and reading from the Torah.” …
Several thousand yeshiva students and haredi school girls convened at the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem to protest the monthly prayer service of the Women of the Wall.
The protesters shouted at the Women of the Wall activists as they were conducting their first monthly service without restrictions after a court ruling two weeks ago reinterpreted existing laws and allowed them to be able to perform their own customs, such as wearing prayer shawls and tefillin, without fear of being arrested.
The idea to send haredi school girls to protest the Women of the Wall was devised by MKs from the United Torah Judaism party earlier this week in consultation with principals of haredi girls schools, on condition the initiative received approval from the leading haredi rabbis.
According to a report on haredi website Kikar Hashabbat, spiritual leader of the haredi world Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman gave his blessing to the proposal on Thursday.
Many participants in the Women of the Wall services don prayer shawls and perform other customs usually performed by men in Orthodox practice, that has until now been prohibited by state law, and as of late, women have been arrested on a frequent basis for wearing prayer shawls during the WoW services.
A court ruling two weeks ago reinterpreted existing laws and the Women of the Wall will on Friday be able to perform their own customs.
At a hearing of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women earlier this week, a representative of the Jerusalem Police confirmed that the police would not act against the recent Jerusalem District Court ruling which decided that WoW’s customs did not contravene “local custom,” that has been the basis for outlawing the group’s non-Orthodox customs.
United Torah Judaism MK Yisrael Eichler expressed outrage during the committee hearing at what he referred to as the Women of the Wall’s “provocations.” He asked if the police would allow the right of protest and demonstration against the group’s prayer service.
The Women of the Wall issued a statement on Thursday celebrating their new found freedoms.
“We have the great merit that Israeli women will arrive in their masses tomorrow for the prayer service for the New Month of Sivan. We call on the public which supports us, women and men, to come and pray with us, to liberate the Western Wall and to turn it into to the home of everyone,” the group said.
Israel: The heads of the Reform and Conservative movements will demand that Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein investigate the involvement of rabbis on the government payroll in Friday’s violent demonstrations at the Western Wall: here.
New leader want the government to recognise that “Jewish temples are like the pyramids and the Sphinx”— an important part of the country’s history
By Lauren Gelfond Feldinger. Web only
Published online: 26 April 2013
Magda Haroun
The new elected head of Cairo’s declining Jewish community, Magda Haroun, said she will campaign to save Egypt’s Jewish synagogues and other historic sites—but according to reports, she will reject offers of help from Israel, because she wants the Egyptian government to recognise that the sites are an important part of their history. “Jewish temples are like the pyramids and the Sphinx,” she told the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. “They are part of Egypt’s history that cannot be ignored.”
Haroun’s election, following the death last month of 84-year-old Carmen Weinstein, is a good sign for Egyptian heritage, an Egyptian filmmaker told The Art Newspaper. Amir Ramses, whose documentary “Jews of Egypt” was released on 27 March, spent four years researching the country’s Jewish communities and heritage sites. Haroun, a 60-year-old-lawyer, “gets what she wants”, Ramses said. “She is very keen to protect Jewish heritage and keep it a part of Egyptian culture and history, just as [with] any other religious historical heritage.”
Officials have alienated Egyptians from the Jewish part of their historical legacy over the years because of the Israeli-Arab conflict, the secular Christian filmmaker said. Haroun will fight to make the Jewish heritage sites more accessible to the Egyptian public “for the first time…in years”, Ramses said, adding that only the Ben Ezra synagogue in a tourist district is accessible. “It is the Egyptian government’s duty to handle the Jewish history in equality to Muslim and Christian,” he said.
At Carmen Weinstein’s funeral last month, Haroun invited the public to Cairo’s dilapidated Bassatine cemetery to witness the waterlogged and neglected state of the ninth-century Jewish burial site, as she talked about following in Weinstein’s footsteps to protect heritage.
In her inaugural letter published by the Cairo Jewish Community Centre, Haroun described Weinstein’s funeral as a coming together of Muslims, Catholics, Copts, officials, youth and other Egyptians. “All of the above were assembled together to honour the passing of a symbol of the Egypt that was. An Egypt open to people from all creeds, nationality and colour,” she wrote.
The Egyptian intellectual community has supported Haroun’s appointment, because of her family history, Ramses said. Haroun’s father was a founder of Egypt’s Tagammu party, which promotes democratic, humanist and socialist values and has opposed the Muslim Brotherhood.
According to a spokeswoman at the Alexandria Jewish Community Centre, Alexandria is one of only two Jewish centres left in Egypt, with 20 Jews remaining in the city: 17 women and three men aged 70-90. In Cairo, there are an estimated 20 or 25 Jews. Most of Egypt’s tens of thousands of Jews fled between the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the 1956 Suez Crisis.
The historical remnants of Egypt’s Jewish history—around two dozen synagogues and a handful of cemeteries and Jewish schools around the country—range from being in well-preserved and reasonable condition to “disastrous”, despite some new restoration projects taken on in recent years by the former minister of culture Farouk Hosni, Ramses said.
Haroun told Al-Ahram that she is seeking Egyptian funding for restoration projects and would otherwise turn to Unesco for assistance. The Alexandria spokeswoman said that they are also hoping for Unesco assistance.
JERUSALEM — A trove of ancient manuscripts in Hebrew characters rescued from caves in a Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan is providing the first physical evidence of a Jewish community that thrived there a thousand years ago.
On Thursday Israel‘s National Library unveiled the cache of recently purchased documents that run the gamut of life experiences, including biblical commentaries, personal letters and financial records.
Researchers say the “Afghan Genizah” marks the greatest such archive found since the “Cairo Genizah” was discovered in an Egyptian synagogue more than 100 years ago, a vast depository of medieval manuscripts considered to be among the most valuable collections of historical documents ever found.
Genizah, a Hebrew term that loosely translates as “storage,” refers to a storeroom adjacent to a synagogue or Jewish cemetery where Hebrew-language books and papers are kept. Under Jewish law, it is forbidden to throw away writings containing the formal names of God, so they are either buried or stashed away.
The Afghan collection gives an unprecedented look into the lives of Jews in ancient Persia in the 11th century. The paper manuscripts, preserved over the centuries by the dry, shady conditions of the caves, include writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judea-Arabic
and the unique Judeo-Persian language from that era, which was written in Hebrew letters.
“It was the Yiddish of Persian Jews,” said Haggai Ben-Shammai, the library’s academic director.
Holding the documents, protected by a laminated sheath, Ben-Shammai said they included mentions of distinctly Jewish names and evidence of their commercial activities along the “Silk road” connecting Europe and the East. The obscure Judeo-Persian language, along with carbon dating technology, helped verify the authenticity of the collection, he said.
“We’ve had many historical sources on Jewish settlements in that area,” he said. “This is the first time that we have a large collection of manuscripts that represents the culture of the Jews that lived there. Until today we had nothing of this.”
The documents are believed to have come from caves in the northeast region of modern-day Afghanistan, once at the outer reaches of the Persian empire. In recent years, the same caves have served as hideouts for Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.
It remains unclear how the ancient manuscripts emerged. Ben-Shammai said the library was contacted by various antiquities dealers who got their hands on them.
Last month, the library purchased 29 out of hundreds of the documents believed to be floating around the world, after long negotiations with antiquities dealers. The library refused to say how much it paid for the collection, adding that it hoped to purchase more in the future and didn’t want to drive up prices. The documents arrived in Israel last week.
Comparisons with the other find are inevitable.
The Cairo Genizah was discovered in the late 1800s in Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue, built in the ninth century. It included thousands of documents Jews stored there for more than 1,000 years.
Ben-Shammai said it was too early to compare the two, and it would take a long time to sift through the findings from Afghanistan. He said they were already significant since no other Hebrew writings had even been found so far from the Holy Land.
He said the Jewish community in the region at the time lived largely like others in the Muslim world, as a “tolerated minority” that was treated better than under Christian rule. Afghanistan’s Jewish community numbered as many as 40,000 in the late 19th century, after Persian Jews fled forced conversion.
By the mid-20th century, only about 5,000 remained, and most emigrated after Israel’s creation in 1948. A lone Jewish man remains in Afghanistan, while 25,000 Jews live in neighboring Iran – Israel’s bitter enemy.
The library promises the finds will be digitized and uploaded to its website for all to see.
Aviad Stollman, curator of the library’s Judaica collection, said much more would be gleaned after intense research on the papers, but already it tells a story of a previously little known community.
“First we can verify that they actually existed – that is the most important point,” he said. “And of course their interests. They were not interested only in commerce and liturgy; they were interested also in the Talmud and the Bible,” he said.
“They were Jews living a thousand years ago in this place. I think that is the most exciting part.”
A confrontation with New York police that was caught on video last week has Jewish community leaders in New York City outraged.
Responding to an anonymous tip about a potentially homeless man sleeping inside The Aliya Institute,
So, if Ehud H. Halevy would have been homeless, would be then have been fair game in the police’s view? Maybe the rabbi of the synagogue is a charitable person, who would provide temporary shelter as the nights are getting colder …
two police officers confronted Ehud H. Halevy on Monday, October 8, and demanded to know what he was doing there. Shirtless and unkempt, he appeared on surveillance video seemingly confused as to why police were demanding he justify his presence and attempting to escort him outside.
When the officers attempted to force his exit from the building, ignoring his claims that he was allowed to be there, Halevy resisted. That’s when one of the officers flew into a rage, putting his fists up like a boxer and launching a flurry of punches.
As the video rolled, Halevy sustained repeated blows from the male officer while a female officer stood by hitting him with a club, then pepper-spraying him. Finally, an upwards of 10 officers ran into the building to ensure the man could not resist any further, and he was taken away.
Video of the incident was released Sunday by the New York blog Crown Heights Info. Appearing at a press conference on Monday evening, Aliya Institute director Rabbi Moshe Feigli demanded that the New York Police Department identify the offending officers and fire them immediately.
“This person had permission to be there,” Feigli said during Monday’s press conference. “Regardless, the behavior of the police department — of two individuals — is beyond comprehension. A very sad moment for me personally. I’m a great supporter of the New York City Police Department, and I continue to be a great supporter, but this behavior is unconscionable, and if not for the video camera to record what happened, we might actually believe that Ehud attacked the police officers, and he never did. He’s charged with felonies, he’s charged with all kinds of crimes, and now I wonder how many other times New Yorkers are charged with serious crimes and there’s no video camera to tell the story.”
Halevy faces charges relating to assault on a police officer, trespassing and resisting arrest, among others.
Leader Of Anti-Semitic Party In Hungary Discovers He’s Jewish
by Eyder Peralta
August 14, 2012
There’s a story out of Hungary that has received quite a bit of play from the religious press but hadn’t quite risen to the mainstream until the AP ran a piece about it today.
It’s quite dramatic with an incredible plot twist: One of the leaders of Hungary‘s Jobbik Party, which the Anti-Defamation League says is one of the few political parties in Europe to overtly campaign with anti-Semitic materials, has discovered that he is himself a Jew.
As the AP says, Csanad Szegedi had in the past railed about the “Jewishness” of the political class. According to the ADL, his party’s presidential candidate referred to Israeli Jews as “lice-infested, dirty murderers.”
For Szegedi all of this came to a screeching halt, when in 2010 a prisoner confronted him with evidence that he had Jewish roots. According to the AP, Szegedi tried to bribe the prisoner to keep him quiet, but rumors and innuendo reached a fever pitch by late last year and in June, Szegedi conceded that his mother was a Jew. According to Jewish law, that makes Szegedi Jewish, too.
Not only that, but Szegedi’s grandmother survived Auschwitz and his grandfather survived labor camps. The AP adds:
“Under pressure, Szegedi resigned last month from all party positions and gave up his Jobbik membership. That wasn’t good enough for the party: Last week it asked him to give up his seat in the European Parliament as well. …
“Szegedi came to prominence in 2007 as a founding member of the Hungarian Guard, a group whose black uniforms and striped flags recalled the Arrow Cross, a pro-Nazi party which briefly governed Hungary at the end of World War II and killed thousands of Jews. In all, 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed during the Holocaust, most of them after being sent in trains to death camps like Auschwitz. The Hungarian Guard was banned by the courts in 2009.
“By then, Szegedi had already joined the Jobbik Party, which was launched in 2003 to become the country’s biggest far-right political force. He soon became one of its most vocal and visible members, and a pillar of the party leadership. Since 2009, he has served in the European Parliament in Brussels as one of the party’s three EU lawmakers, a position he says he wants to keep.”
Israeli archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a monumental synagogue building dating to the Late Roman period at the archaeological site of Huqoq in Galilee.
Huqoq is an ancient Jewish village located approximately two to three miles west of Capernaum and Migdal (Magdala).
During the second season of excavations, the team discovered portions of a stunning mosaic floor decorating the interior of the synagogue building.
The mosaic, which is made of tiny colored stone cubes of the highest quality, includes a scene depicting Samson placing torches between the tails of foxes – as related in the book of Judges 15.
In another part of the mosaic, two human (apparently female) faces flank a circular medallion with a Hebrew inscription that refers to rewards for those who perform good deeds.
“This discovery is significant because only a small number of ancient (Late Roman) synagogue buildings are decorated with mosaics showing biblical scenes, and only two others have scenes with Samson (one is at another site just a couple of miles from Huqoq),” said Jodi Magness, the Kenan Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“Our mosaics are also important because of their high artistic quality and the tiny size of the mosaic cubes,” Prof Magness said.
“This, together with the monumental size of the stones used to construct the synagogue’s walls, suggest a high level of prosperity in this village, as the building clearly was very costly.”
Oldest Jewish Archaeological Evidence on the Iberian Peninsula
25 May 2012 Friedrich Schiller University Jena
Sensational Discovery by Archaeologists of Jena University at a Portuguese Excavation Site
Archaeologists of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) found one of the oldest archaeological evidence so far of Jewish culture on the Iberian Peninsula at an excavation site in the south of Portugal, close to the city of Silves (Algarve). On a marble plate, measuring 40 by 60 centimetres, the name “Yehiel” can be read, followed by further letters which have not yet been deciphered. The Jena archaeologists believe that the new discovery might be a tomb slab. Antlers, which were found very close to the tomb slab in the rubble gave a clue to the age determination. “The organic material of the antlers could be dated by radiocarbon analysis with certainty to about 390 AD,” excavation leader Dr. Dennis Graen of the Jena University explains. “Therefore we have a so-called ‘terminus ante quem’ for the inscription, as it must have been created before it got mixed in with the rubble with the antlers.”
The earliest archaeological evidence of Jewish inhabitants in the region of modern-day Portugal has so far also been a tomb slab with a Latin inscription and an image of a menorah – a seven-armed chandelier – from 482 AD. The earliest Hebrew inscriptions known until now date from the 6th or 7th Century AD.
For three years the team of the University Jena has been excavating a Roman villa in Portugal, discovered some years ago by Jorge Correia, archaeologist of the Silves council, during an archaeological survey near the village of São Bartolomeu de Messines (Silves). The project was aiming at finding out how and what the inhabitants of the hinterland of the Roman province of Lusitania lived off. While the Portuguese coast region has been explored very well, there is very little knowledge about those regions. The new discovery poses further conundrums. “We were actually hoping for a Latin inscription when we turned round the excavated tomb slab,“ Henning Wabersich, a member of the excavation reports. After all, no inscriptions have been found so far and nothing was known about the identity of the inhabitants of the enclosure.
Only after long research the Jena archaeologists found out which language they were exactly dealing with, as the inscription was not cut with particular care. “While we were looking for experts who could help with deciphering the inscription between Jena and Jerusalem, the crucial clue came from Spain“ Dennis Graen says. “Jordi Casanovas Miró from the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona – a well-known expert for Hebrew inscriptions on the Iberian Peninsula – is sure that the Jewish name “Yehiel” can be read, – a name that is already mentioned in the Bible.“ Not only is the early date exceptional in this case, but also the place of the discovery: Never before have Jewish discoveries been made in a Roman villa, the Jena Archaelogist explains.
In the Roman Empire at that time Jews usually wrote in Latin, as they feared oppressive measures. Hebrew, as on the re-discovered marble plate, only came back into use after the decline of the Roman supremacy, respectively in the following time of migration of peoples from the 6th or 7th century AD. “We were also most surprised that we found traces of Romans – romanised Lusitanians in this case – and Jews living together in a rural area of all things,” Dennis Graen says. “We assumed that something like this would have been much more likely in a city.“
Information about the Jewish population in the region in general was mostly passed down by scriptures. “During the ecclesiastical council in the Spanish town Elvira about 300 AD rules of conduct between Jews and Christians were issued. This indicates that at this time there must have been a relatively large number of Jews on the Iberian Peninsula already”, Dennis Graen explains – but archaeological evidence had been missing so far. “We knew that there was a Jewish community in the Middle Ages not far from our excavation site in the town of Silves. It existed until the expulsion of the Jews in the year 1497.“
In the summer the Jena Archaeologists will take up their work again. Until now they have excavated 160 square metres of the villa, but after checking out the ground it already became clear that the greater part of the enclosure is still covered in soil. “We eventually want to find out more about the people who lived here,” Graen explains the venture. “And of course we want to solve the questions the Hebrew inscription has posed us.“
Police blanketed the south searching for the killer.
President Nicolas Sarkozy warned that “a monster is on the loose”
Of course, every reasonable person will agree that this murder of Jewish children and a teacher is horrible and monstrous.
However, Mr Sarkozy should seriously ask himself whether right-wing politicians, of the neo-fascist Front National (National Front) of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine, but also Mr Sarkozy himself, have contributed to creating a climate favourable for crimes like this.
and Interior Minister Claude Gueant confirmed that police believed the gunman, who sped away on a motorcycle after the attack, may have filmed his actions.
“He was wearing an apparatus around his neck” that could be used to film and post videos online, the minister told reporters, though he added that while this information helped investigators they were no closer to an arrest.
The deaths of the rabbi, his two children and another child at a Jewish school in Toulouse were almost immediately linked to the deaths of paratroopers killed in Toulouse and Montauban.
Those murdered soldiers were of North African ancestry, so prabably Muslims; and of black Caribbean ancestry. Like Jews, favourite targets for “white nationalist” neo-nazi criminals.
Mr Gueant has suggested that the killing spree may be linked to the case of three paratroopers who were expelled from a regiment near Toulouse in 2008 for alleged neonazi activities, including being photographed doing nazi salutes in front of a swastika flag.
However, he admitted that this was merely one possibility “not favoured any more than the others” and that the perpetrator or perpetrators had not been identified.
Police raised the terror threat level across much of the country’s south to scarlet – the highest possible – and boosted security around both Jewish and Muslim institutions. Mr Sarkozy met with leaders from both communities yesterday.
France has the highest Jewish and Muslim populations in Europe, at 500,000 and five million.
Murders in France follow Sarkozy’s racist speech: here.
One witness in Montauban said the visor on the gunman’s helmet briefly flipped up, revealing an extensive tattoo and a scar on his left cheek. She described him as being solidly built and of medium height.
At 9PM yesterday evening, the news magazine Le Point reported that police were searching for three paratroopers dismissed from the 17th Parachute Regiment in 2008 after they posed for photographs wearing neo-Nazi uniforms and standing in front of a flag with a swastika. Jamel Benserhir, the former soldier who reported them to officers at the time, said they had “explicit tattoos.”
The Francazal base was involved in a tragic scandal in 1989, when four paratroopers were found guilty of torturing and murdering three young women and killing a forest ranger.
French paratroopers have a history of torture and other crimes, like during the Algerian colonial war (in which Jean Marie Le Pen participated as well).
Others, however, felt obliged to acknowledge the political link between the targeting of religious or ethnic minorities and the development of French bourgeois politics. Le Nouvel Observateur cited Abderrahmane Dahmane, a former Sarkozy adviser, as criticizing Sarkozy’s right-wing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) and the FN. Dahmane said, “These acts are a strong signal sent to politicians and particularly to those who, in recent months, have played with fire… These attacks are the consequence of a campaign that has been particularly violent and hateful towards religious minorities.”
Chris Hedges | Murder Is Not an Anomaly in War. Chris Hedges, Truthdig in the USA: “The war in Afghanistan – where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal – feeds the culture of atrocity…. Civilians and combatants merge into one detested nameless, faceless mass. The psychological leap to murder is short”: here.
The latest slaughter in Afghanistan is part of a decade of savage civilian killing: until Nato leaves, it is certain to continue: here.
The Center for Information and Documentation about Israel in the Netherlands (CIDI) demands an apology from the Pope. A Vatican prelate compared the allegations of sexual abuse within the church with anti-Semitism.
He made his statement in Rome in the presence of the pope. The CIDI says that the pope should apologize frankly and remove that priest from his position.
The CIDI calls it shocking that victims of hatred of Jews are equalized with priests who have abused children. The Vatican has said that the opinion of that priest is not the church’s view.
Rome rabbi says attacks on pope cannot be compared to anti-Semitism: here.
At a time when his relations with Pope Benedict XVI are already strained over the pope’s offer to dissatisfied Anglicans of fast-track conversion to Roman Catholicism, the archbishop of Canterbury has plunged into the crisis over cases of abuse by Catholic priests, choosing the Easter weekend to describe the Catholic Church in Ireland as “losing all credibility” because of its poor handling of the crisis: here.
Catholic archbishops in Britain have used their Easter sermons to admit the Church’s “guilt” and “shame” over the sex abuse scandal: here.
Legal Scholars Question Holy See’s Implied Statehood, Pope Benedict’s Ability to Be Tried in Clerical Abuse Scandal: here.
Media Takes Gloves Off For Clergy Abuse Scandal: here.
Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, charged Monday that Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, not the current pope, had delayed last-minute attempts to punish a dying US priest with a long history of sexually abusing deaf boys: here.
