Tag: International Jewry

Jeremy Jones, Director of International and of Community Affairs for the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, participated in the 24th meeting of the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee [ILC], which was held in Rome, Italy, from 13-16 May 2019.

The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) mourns the passing of Bob Hawke, one of Australia's greatest statesmen, and a much-beloved friend of both the Australian Jewish community and of Israel.

A Sunday afternoon ritual is anti-AIPAC demonstrations outside the conference venue. I spent some time among the rag-tag assembly broadly united on the theme of #stopAIPAC. It was interesting to see and hear the arguments or slogans being proferred and who was doing the proferring.

It is deeply regrettable that recent political manoeuvres in Israel appear likely to bolster the credibility and electoral prospects of Otzma Yehudit, a party comprised of followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

While of course events in Venezuela are still very much up in the air, for a community long in decline, there is today new reason to hope, however warily, for Venezuela’s Jews.

A new CNN survey has once again put antisemitism into the news headlines. According to the survey of 7000 people across seven European countries, as many as 25% of Europeans have traditional antisemitic attitudes.

History has been deeply unkind to the Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa, and so too has the historical record.

Despite being delayed several times before, Iraqi Kurdistan is now set to vote in an independence referendum on 25 September 2017.

The Kurdish people are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, at approximately 30 million people. They speak "various dialects of their own language, Kurdish, although governments have sometimes banned its usage", and are largely Sunni Muslim. Although they have no state of their own, they are indigenous to a mountainous region which covers territory in present day Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Armenia.

I am a forgotten Jew. My roots are nearly 2,600 years old, my ancestors made landmark contributions to world civilisation, and my presence was felt from North Africa to the Fertile Crescent - but I barely exist today. You see, I am a Jew from the Arab world.

The advantages the Jews experienced under the rule of the Shah - high socioeconomic status, strong ties to Israel and the United States - became liabilities in the age of the Ayatollahs. As in many other dark eras in Jewish history, the Jews were accused of stealing the country's treasures, and flyers were circulated throughout Teheran urging vengeance against them. There was mass confiscation of wealth along with rampant antisemitism and violence against the Jewish population, and as the streets filled up with hordes of people chanting "death to America" and "death to Israel", many Persian Jews fled to those very countries.

Some of the Jews who remained in Iran decided to embrace the revolution and the nation's new rulers...