Settlers retaliate after West Bank stabbing death

Several Palestinians injured in attacks; ‘situation has reached the level of craziness,’ Nablus resident says

A Palestinian Authority official has called on Palestinian civilians to be cautious while driving by Israeli settlements, after a number of Palestinian vehicles were pelted with stones immediately following the fatal stabbing of an Israeli citizen at the Tapuah junction Tuesday morning.

Ghassan Daghlas, who monitors Jewish settlement-building in the northern West Bank, told the Ma’an news agency that he expected more attacks by settlers on Palestinian cars, after the windshield of a bus carrying schoolgirls from Ramallah was shattered by stones hurled at it near the settlement of Yitzhar, south of Nablus.

Yitzhar was home to Evyatar Borowsky, a 32-year-old father of five, who was stabbed to death earlier on Tuesday by Salam As’ad Zaghal, a Palestinian from Tulkarem, at the Tapuah junction.

Retaliatory acts by settlers from Yitzhar and Tapuah followed the lethal stabbing, local media and human rights groups reported. Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli watchdog, reported that settlers attacked and moderately injured a Palestinian farmer near the village of Furiq and uprooted some 100 olive trees near the village of Qaryut.

Khalil Assaf, a Nablus resident who heads the Consortium of Independent Palestinians in the West Bank, a grassroots organization of businessmen and academics, warned that violence in the northern West Bank could quickly spin out of control.

“The situation is very bad, it has reached the level of craziness,” Assaf told The Times of Israel, reporting that Palestinians in the area were avoiding leaving their homes for fear of settler attacks on the roads.

“If the IDF does not control the situation, many more innocent people will be injured,” Assaf added, referring to the attack on the Palestinian school bus near Nablus.

A spokesman for the IDF confirmed that “a violent and illegal demonstration” took place at the Yitzhar junction on Tuesday, with two Israeli civilians detained by the army.

Hey Jews, Go Back to Poland!

We're used to a certain kind of Jewish nostalgia for the old country and the relative simplicity of shtetl life, but nobody's really serious about going back there.

Right?
Not exactly. Since 2007, Israeli media artist Yael Bartana has been developing the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, a multifaceted project that includes films, a manifesto, and even a 2012 conference, all of which call for Jews to "stun Europe" by "returning" to Poland.
In one of the films,  a young, left-wing Polish intellectual calls out to a stadium: "Jews! Fellow countrymen! People! You think the old woman who still sleeps under Rivke’s quilt doesn't want to see you? Has forgotten about you? You're wrong. She dreams about you every night…Return to Poland, to your country! Stand by her bed and lay your hands on that old quilt."
We may never know if we are meant to take JRMiP's call seriously, or if this is all an elaborate, ironic art project. But if it's geared toward raising questions, it's certainly succeeding. For starters, what would Poland make of a massive influx of Jews? Would Warsaw start selling better falafel?

Israeli Doctors Are Treating Boston Bombing Suspect: New Details on His Condition

Police stand guard outside Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Friday, April 19, 2013 after an ambulance carrying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a19-year-old Massachusetts college student wanted in the Boston Marathon bombings, arrived (AP)
As 19-year-old Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev "clings to life," Israeli media revealed that two of the senior doctors treating Tsarnaev have abundant past experience treating victims of terror. That's because they're from Israel.

Dr. Kevin (Ilan) Tabb, president and CEO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston told the Israeli website Ynet that Tsarnaev is in stable condition but that because of wounds to his throat, he may never be able to speak again.

Tabb received his medical degree at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is also a board member of Hadassah-Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem. That background gave him a unique perspective in responding to Monday's terrorist attack.

"Unfortunately, I have had a lot of experience with these types of injuries after years of treating people injured in terror attacks in Israel," Tabb said.

Ynet reports:

He told Ynet that the Boston Marathon attack resulted in "numerous leg injuries from the blasts, and there were many amputations as well. In Israel we are used to this and here they are not, but the hospital was prepared. Most of those who were seriously injured in the attack were sent to the three main trauma centers in Boston, including ours.
"It was very similar to what I was used to in Israel in that we had to admit many injured people in a short period of time," Professor Tabb said. "The fact that we are treating both the victims and the suspected terrorist also reminds me of similar situations in Israel. In Israel we had an injured soldier and a terrorist lying on adjacent beds. When an injured person is admitted to the ER, the doctor or nurse treats him without asking questions."

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Carmen Weinstein, Who Led the Jews of Cairo, Dies at 82

CAIRO — Carmen Weinstein, the leader of Cairo’s small Jewish community and the driving force behind the restoration of Maimonides’s yeshiva and other monuments of Egyptian Jewish history, died on Saturday at her home here on the island of Zamalek. She was 82.

Her death was announced by the Jewish Community Council of Cairo, of which she was president.

Ms. Weinstein refused to accept that Egypt’s once-vibrant Jewish community was dying out, even if its ranks had dwindled to just a few dozen elderly people from more than 80,000 six decades ago. “We are still in Cairo despite what everybody says,” she told a Los Angeles Times reporter 11 years ago.

When the Historical Society of Jews From Egypt, an American group based in Brooklyn, sought help from Congress to remove historical artifacts and prayer books, known as seforim, to the United States for safekeeping, Ms. Weinstein resisted, saying she would ignore the society’s “insensitive letters referring to our inevitable extinction.”

Instead, in 1997, she persuaded the government to classify the Jewish artifacts as Egyptian antiquities, preventing their sale or export. “Taking the Jewish seforim, books and records out of Egypt is tantamount to saying that Egypt should demolish the pyramids and the Temple of Luxor because there are no pharaohs left,” Ms. Weinstein said.

She pronounced herself unflustered by any hostility from her Muslim neighbors over tensions between Israel and the Arab world. “We have no troubles and we don’t talk politics,” she curtly told The Associated Press during Israel’s 2009 war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

President Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, issued a statement mourning the loss of Ms. Weinstein. “She was a dedicated Egyptian who worked tirelessly to preserve Egyptian Jewish heritage and valued, above all else, living and dying in her country, Egypt,” he said.

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Heart of Stone: Liberating the Wall for Women Too

Most Israelis and probably the vast majority of haredi women do not know that halacha, Jewish law, permits women to wear talit and tefillin, and read Torah from a Torah scroll. Secular Israelis do not know this, for obvious reasons. The religion they do not practice is Orthodox – ultra-Orthodox. In an unwritten, unholy alliance of Israeli secularism and ultra-Orthodoxy, Judaism stays so archaic, alien and repulsive that secular Israelis need never encounter it seriously – which, conveniently, leaves the ultra-Orthodox variants in unchallenged control of a culture that is the national heritage – and the national responsibility – of all Jews.

But anyone with a modicum of learning in Jewish texts knows that halacha does not prohibit women doing these things, as some modern Orthodox rabbis have recently begun pointing out to their congregations. That haredi women – the ones shrieking at the Women of the Wall about sacrilege, cancer, Divine condemnation, and the rest – do not know this, speaks volumes about the subjugated place of women in that society; and about the male structures that construct and control that society with an iron hand and what they succeed in imposing on the rest of us.

The Women of the Wall go straight to the heart of the matter. We are Jews. Not just daughters of Jews, wives of Jews, sisters of Jews, mothers of Jews. Jews. Adult, responsible Jews, praying, celebrating, living as such in our own right. What we seek to do at the Wall is done there every day of the week by men; these are no heterodox acts. When men do them they are mitzvot – commandments – but under the current regime there, when women do them, they are sacrilege, “blasphemy,” “disturbing the public order,” offensive to “the worshipers” (meaning, haredi men and women), denying that the Women of the Wall are worshipers.

If the sancta of Judaism are blasphemy and criminal acts when women undertake them in public, at Judaism’s holiest site and the site of highest national memory, there is something wrong not with the women, and not with Judaism, but with a society that allows utter misogyny hegemony there.

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How to Paint Your Nails for Israel Independence Day

Today is Yom Ha’atzmaut, aka Israel Independence Day. It celebrates the anniversary of the creation of Israel on May 14, 1948 (or, according to the Jewish calendar, the 5th of Iyyar in 5708).
In Israel, it’s celebrated with fireworks, barbecues, and public concerts. In America, it’s celebrated with a manicure (or at least it can be…)
Yael Buechler, the fabulous rabbi behind Midrash Manicures, in which she creates nail art for each weekly Torah portion and holidays, has offered up this great tutorial for how to do your own Israeli flag nail art in celebration of Yom Ha’atzmaut. It’s pretty simple and will look super cute on adult and kiddie nails alike. Here’s how it’s done. You can use a toothpick to do the finer details.

The West Wing's Leo McGarry on Israel's Memorial Day

On this Yom Hazikaron take some time to remember