The hubbub surrounding Cubas small Jewish community these days does not faze Yakob Berezniak Hernandez. Sitting behind a desk crowded with a typewriter, several cans of Liebers tomato paste and piles of loose foreign change, Hernandez, of Havanas Adath Israel synagogue, waved away inquiries about Alan Gross, the 61-year-old American Jewish contractor sentenced to 15 years in prison March 15. Gross was found guilty of seeking to clandestinely distribute Internet satellite communications equipment to Cubas Jewish …More

Students from the University of California, Irvine met with a Hamas leader during a 2009 student trip to Israel. The Institute for Jewish and Community Research said it learned recently that the university's branch of the Olive Tree Initiative, an Israeli-Palestinian peace organization, arranged for a meeting between the Irvine students and a Hamas leader in the West Bank while the students were on a trip to Israel in September 2009. The institute is protesting the meeting. The meeting was revealed in …More

Fogels friend comes to the U.S.to explain the beleaguered town. From the highest elevation in Itamar you can see everything but the future. On a clear day, says Rabbi Moshe Goldsmith, Itamars mayor, We can see the three seas: the Dead Sea, the Mediterranean and the Kinneret (Galilee). To the west, We can see Gerezim and Ebal, the twin mountains linked in the Bible to the Blessing and the Curse, but untrained eyes cant tell one from the other. To be the mayor of Itamar is to be the mayor of a yishuv, a settlement …More

Congressman Michael Grimm from New York has become the first Republican in the House of Representatives to express support for Jonathan Pollard and call upon President Obama to grant him clemency. Grimm, a first-term legislator representing Staten Island, joins a growing list of American politicians and other public figures calling for Pollards release. In a YouTube video posted this week, Grimm relates that he visited Pollard in prison about two weeks ago, and that 26 years of his life are gone, and he wont get …More

State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss said on Thursday he would look into two recent reports according to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu illegally obtained campaign donations and travelled at the expense of private businessmen. One report, released by Channel 10 earlier this week, claimed that Netanyahu accepted funding from private businessmen for trips for himself and his family while in public office. The second report claimed that in 2005 Netanyahu had received private campaign donations without …More

Austrian authorities presented plans Wednesday to restore and revamp the former Mauthausen concentration camp, calling it an important contribution to preventing the resurgence of Nazi sentiment. The Nazis killed about half the 200,000 inmates in the main camp or its affiliates around the villages of Mauthausen and Gusen, located near the Austrian city of Linz. It is now a site for commemorating Holocaust victims and learning about the horrors of its history. About 200,000 people, including many students, visit …More

The wreckage of a motorcycle hit by an Israeli rocket in the southern city of Rafah. Two militants were wounded; one died. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that it had investigated recent rocket explosions and found that locally produced projectiles had fallen on homes in Gaza or exploded in factories where they were made or stored. Shrapnel severely wounded several people, including a 22-year-old woman and her 7-month-old baby. It called on the Hamas government, which controls Gaza, to investigate and …More

Israel Air Force jets struck Wednesday a group of Palestinian militants in southern Gaza, killing one gunman and wounding another as they rode a motorcycle, Gaza medical officials said. The Israel Defense Forces confirmed carrying out the dawn strike, saying it targeted Palestinians who had launched a short-range rocket across the border on Tuesday. No one was hurt in that attack, which followed a surge in fighting around Gaza this month. Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian faction that has played a leading role in the …More

American Jewish author Philip Roth is among the 13 authors shortlisted for the biennial Man Booker International Prize which will be awarded on May 18 in Sydney. The prize is worth 60,000 pounds ($96,000) to the winner, and living authors whose works of fiction are either originally in English or generally available in English translation are eligible. It honors a writer's body of work as opposed to the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction which is awarded for a single book. It is the first time that Chinese …More

Facebook removed a hugely popular and controversial page supporting a third intifada once it saw that comments on the page had deteriorated to direct calls for violence, the social networking giant told the State of Israel, in a letter published Thursday. The page, entitled Third Palestinian Intifada, had more than 340,000 fans when it was removed earlier this week. Richard Allen, Facebooks director of policy for Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the social networking giant wrote Public Diplomacy and Diaspora …More

Former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove recounted Wednesday in a rare appearance the British spy agency's tenuous relations with Israel, saying that it had had to keep information from the Jewish state a number of times. Speaking at a conference marking the 60th anniversary of British-Israeli diplomatic relations, at which President Shimon Peres was also present, Sir Richard added that Hezbollah and Hamas were Iranian satellites. "There is no doubt that Israel plays by a different set of rules than the rules that …More

Hamas on Thursday condemned the imprisonment and capture of Palestinian engineer Dirar Abu Sisi, calling it a violation of international law.Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zohi said that "[Prime Minister Binyamin]Netanyahu's statements are an attempt to hide the crime of kidnapping [Sisi] in the Ukraine and his illegal transfer to a Zionist prison." "The kidnapping of Abu Sisi is an example of Israeli contempt for internationallaw and the international community," Zohi said, while pleading …More