Jewish & World News

Prosecutors in Bialystok declined to open an investigation into Jewish ritual slaughter in the northeastern town of Tykocin. Prosecutors acknowledged that it did not violate Polish law. The prosecutor began investigating the March 12 shechitah, or kosher slaughter, of a cow in the northeastern town of Tykocin after hearing about it from a county veterinarian in Bialystok.

Poland's Jewish community does not want a planned monument to righteous gentiles to be erected near the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The museum, which is due to open this month, is located on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Poland's Jewish community has about a one-month supply of kosher meat left, following a ban on ritual slaughter. Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, confirmed to JTA on Monday from Warsaw that Poland will run out of kosher meat within a month. The ban on ritual slaughter, or shechitah, went into effect at the beginning of the year.

Researchers of Polish Jewry are set to gain online access to more than 1 million new documents following an agreement signed by the Polish State Archives. Under the agreement signed last week, Jewish Records Indexing-Poland will receive indices to the documents from the Polish archives authority and place them on the website of the online database within one year, a JRI-Poland statement read.

A project to reinforce the ground beneath the only synagogue at the Auschwitz memorial and state museum will begin this spring. Tomasz Kuncewicz, director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center, the site of the former Nazi death camp, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the Lomdei Mishnayot Synagogue project would cost approximately $330,000. He said the site was in danger of collapse unless the sloping ground on which it sits was reinforced.

A yearlong investigation into anti-Semitic epithets painted on the memorial to the Jedwabne pogrom was closed. The Lomza District Prosecutor ended the investigation on Monday after being unable to locate the perpetrators.

Two Torah scrolls, one complete and one incomplete, found last week in Poland's Sokolow Podlaski district, have a new owner. The Torah scrolls found Aug. 20 are believed to have belonged to a synagogue in nearby Wegrow. They have been turned over to the Wegrow Public Library.

A court in Bialystok, Poland sentenced four young men to a year in prison in part for racism and anti-Semitism. They were jailed for being active members of a group that promotes fascism, and public incitement to hatred on grounds of nationality and religion.

Twenty-five young Polish Jews, many of whom have only recently discovered their Jewish roots, arrived in Israel this week for a special seminar organized by Shavei Israel, an organization that aims to strengthen the connection between descendants of Jews and the State of Israel and the Jewish people. The participants, between the ages of 18-35, most of whom were raised Catholic, came from a variety of cities throughout Poland, primarily Krakow, Katowice, Warsaw, Przemysl and Gdansk. For many it marks their first time visiting Israel.

Several Polish diplomatic missions have yet to fulfill a request by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promote a book on their websites about Poles and their relationships with Jews during the Holocaust. The ministry in July asked the missions to put a link to “Inferno of Choices: Poles and the Holocaust" (Rytm) on their websites, but several of the missions have not complied, the Rzeczpospolita newspaper reported Tuesday. Some Polish historians have criticized the book, accusing the authors of drawing false conclusions.

Polish government officials unveiled a memorial plaque in Warsaw in honor of Warsaw Ghetto hero Janusz Korczak. Sunday's unveiling took place exactly 70 years after German soldiers sent Korczak and 192 Jewish orphans to their deaths in Treblinka, a Nazi extermination camp.

Poland’s general prosecutor has called off a year-long investigation into antisemitism on some of Poland’s largest internet portals and websites. The decision was taken, according to the general prosecutor’s office, “because of lack of public interest”. The probe was initiated in April last year when Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski filed a complaint about websites which carried the words: “To the oven, Jews, to the oven. Hitler started, we will finish.”

Jewish youth with Bnei Akiva have been repairing a neglected cemetery from pre-war Europe in memory of the thriving Jewish communities wiped out in the Holocaust. The youth, from South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, were inspired to act after touring concentration camps. “After a week of seeing the destruction of countless Jewish communities, we were able to spend some time helping to preserve the memories of those who once lived there,” said volunteer Justin Gillman.

Mitt Romney toured the site of the future Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, completing the third leg of a three-country tour that also included Britain and Israel, on Tuesday met with museum chairman Piotr Wislicki, deputy chairman Marian Turski, interim director Waldemar Dabrowski, exhibition director Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and representatives of the museum’s two largest benefactors, the Taube Foundation and the Koret Foundation, Helise Lieberman and Yale Reisner.

More than 40 “hidden Jews” are expected to participate in a seminar in Poland dedicated to the study of Talmud. The gathering being held this week at the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva coincides with the completion of the Daf Yomi, the 7 1/2-year cycle of page-a-day Talmud study that was launched by the yeshiva’s founder, Rabbi Meir Shapiro, more than 80 years ago.

A former head of Poland’s foreign intelligence service faces charges of illegal detention and use of corporal punishment at an alleged secret CIA “black site” used to house high-ranking terrorism suspects. Zbigniew Siemiatowski confirmed to Gazeta Wyborcza, a Polish newspaper, that prosecutors had charged him as part of their long-running investigation into a secret detention centre in eastern Poland used by the CIA from 2002 to 2003 for suspects in transit to Guantanamo Bay, but said he refused to co-operate.

Poland is issuing commemorative coins this month to honor three Catholic-Polish families who were killed by the Nazis for having rescued Jews during the Holocaust. The two coins, in denominations of two zlotys, worth about 65 cents, and 20 zlotys, worth about $6.50, will be issued by the National Bank of Poland on March 15. They honor the Ulma, Kowalski and Baranek families.

Maja Brand, a Jewish activist from Krakow, was among the 16 people killed when two trains collided in southern Poland. Friends said Brand, who turned 30 on Feb. 22,  was active “in all things Jewish” in Krakow. The head-on collision occurred Saturday night. Brand was working on her doctorate at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, writing her dissertation on the ban of shechitah, or kosher slaughter, in Poland in the 1930s. She reportedly was to have flown to Israel on Monday to carry out further research.

A new video posted to YouTube gathers the calls by top U.S. officials to free Jonathan Pollard, who was convicted on a single count of passing classified information to an ally more than 26 years ago and is serving a life sentence for the crime, which usually carries a maximum prison term of two to four years.     Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and former CIA director James Woolsey are just a few of several top U.S. officials who have called to free Pollard.

Every Polish town and village had its Holocaust. That’s what Zuzanna Radzik wants Polish children to learn. Her task is not easy. Although Polish children are taught about the Holocaust, they don’t learn what happened in their own towns. The killing did not just happen in the death camps that they are taught about, such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. It also took place in little-known towns like Stoczek Wegrowski, where 188 Jews were shot to death on Yom Kippur, Sept. 22, 1942.