Jewish & World News

A Dutch appeals court has upheld a €60 ($90) fine against an Orthodox Jew who refused to show police an identity card, citing religious reasons. The Hague Appeals Court ruled that a law which makes it mandatory for all people older than 14 to carry ID cards and show them to police upon request does not have a religious exemption.

When Jacob Nathan de Leeuwe found himself returning nearly two decades ago from his home in a suburb of Amsterdam to this isolated idyll he calls “the end of the world,” it undoubtedly was the pull of his roots. De Leeuwe’s family had lived in this semi-autonomous region in the northern Netherlands known as Friesland for 200 years, and a unique Jewish community with its own customs, traditions and even language had thrived here. His mother was raised in Leeuwarden, Friesland’s capital, among 1,500 Jews concentrated in a Jewish quarter that had several kosher butcher shops, a kosher cafe and a Jewish education network going from kindergarten to high school.

The government of the Netherlands and Yad Vashem have agreed to digitally archive documents connected to Dutch rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. The documents will be scanned by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust commemoration authority, in the next two years, Yad Vashem deputy spokesperson Yifat Bachrach-Ron told JTA.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has urged Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch conservative Freedom Party, to drop the party's call to ban the Jewish practice of Shechita, or ritual slaughter of animals, from its platform before the Netherlands’ Sept 12th national elections, saying it “will further encourage and empower anti-Semitism across Europe.” “The demonization of core Jewish rituals has historically been the domain of tyrants and dictators, often contributing to severe discrimination, violence and even genocide against the Jewish people…,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center wrote in an e-mail to Wilders.

Prominent Dutch politician Frits Bolkestein sparked an uproar in the Netherlands by saying practicing Jews had “no future here, and should emigrate to the US or Israel,” French newspaper Le Monde reported Tuesday.

In the wake of the desecration of a 280-year-old synagogue and other recent anti-Semitic incidents in the Netherlands, a Jewish group has asked the European Union to intervene.

The future of around 2,000 Dutch soldiers serving in Afghanistan has been thrown into doubt by the collapse Saturday of the Netherlands' coalition government. Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's office said in a statement that the Labor Party had withdrawn from the government following days of talks over whether the troops should be brought home. Balkenende's center-right Christian Democratic Alliance had hoped to keep the country's troops in Afghanistan as part of NATO's International Security and Assistance Force beyond an August deadline for their return. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen asked the Netherlands to extend its mission in Afghanistan earlier this month. The Netherlands currently has 1,950 troops serving in Afghanistan's Uruzgan province as part of NATO's International Security and Assistance Force, according to the ISAF Web site. The Dutch government extended the military mission by two years back in 2007. But the...