Comments (0)Brazilian School District Must Teach Shoah
June 23, 2009Rio de Janeiro
JTA Wire Service
A major Brazilian city made the teaching of the Holocaust mandatory in its public schools.
Middle schools in Porto Alegre must include the Holocaust in their history curriculum, according to a bill introduced by Jewish Councilman Valter Nagelstein that was approved earlier this month by the City Council.
“Several youths are not familiar with this history and the lessons that stem from these sad times,” Nagelstein told the Brazilian Jewish press. “Therefore the public school system has the duty to promote a better understanding of this subject.”
Porto Alegre is among Brazil’s 10 largest cities and, with some 12,000 Jews, home to its third largest Jewish community. It has been the site of many anti-Semitic attacks.
The city also has a large population of German descendants.
According to an American Jewish Committee survey conducted in 2001, one-third of Brazilians have no awareness of the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II, and 11 percent say it is possible that the Holocaust never happened.
Sarkozy: Burka ‘Not Welcome’ in France
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the burka has no place in his country.
“The burka is not welcome,” he said during an address Monday to the French parliament amid a parliamentary debate on whether the full body covering worn by Muslim women should be outlawed.
Sarkozy also took the opportunity to defend his country’s secular law forbidding citizens from wearing visible religious symbols in public schools and institutions.
“We shouldn’t be ashamed of our values. We shouldn’t be afraid to defend them,” Sarkozy said in an apparent partial response to President Obama’s perceived indirect criticism of French secularism in a speech earlier this month.
The U.S. leader said religious people in Western countries should be free to dress as they choose.
Sarkozy said the burka, which includes a woven mesh covering the eyes, “is not a religious symbol. It’s a symbol of subservience.”
French law bars Muslim women from wearing headscarves in public institutions. The same applies to any visible religious symbols, such as Jewish skullcaps.
Sarkozy’s comments were in response to a debate over a parliamentary proposal to form an investigative committee to analyze whether the burka should be restricted in France.
Members of French government disagree on whether legislation against the burka would encourage the custom more than prevent it.
Following the 2004 law against wearing a Muslim headscarf, some young women began wearing the garment to school in protest.
Bones Reburied in Medieval Jewish Cemetery
The bones of about 100 people exhumed from a medieval Jewish cemetery in Spain during construction work were reburied.
A spokesman for the Conference of European Rabbis said the reburial took place during a ceremony Sunday in Toledo attended by local Jewish leaders and regional authorities. The bones were reinterred in their original graves.
The reburial was the result of “protracted negotiations” that concluded last week, said the spokesman, who praised the “solidarity and cooperation” of the Spanish government and local Jewish federation for achieving a “remarkable and historic” solution that was “within the boundaries of halachah.”
Earlier this year the Spanish government halted construction on the site following protests, including demonstrations by Orthodox Jews outside Spanish embassies in other countries. The site was being developed for the expansion of a school that already occupies part of the cemetery land.
Local authorities in Toledo had offered to hand over the bones for reburial at another site, but the local Jewish federation, supported by the Conference of European Rabbis and the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe, demanded that the bones be returned to their original resting place.
Philip Carmel, the executive director of the Jewish cemetery preservation organization Lo Tishkach, said that construction on the school will continue, but building will only take place around the cemetery and the area will be marked as an ancient Jewish cemetery.
Palestinians Accusing Canadian Firms of ‘War Crimes’
Two Canadian firms are committing “war crimes” by building on land in the West Bank, a Palestinian farming community is claiming in a lawsuit.
A three-day trial in Quebec Superior Court starting Monday in Montreal marks the first time that Canada’s War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act, passed in 2000, will be used in a civil case.
The village of Bil’in, with a population of 1,700, claims that Green Park International and Green Mount International, two companies registered in Quebec, are “aiding, abetting, assisting and conspiring with Israel’’ to illegally construct residential and other buildings on the village’s lands.
Bil’in’s land is subject to the rules and obligations of international law, the village alleges, because the West Bank has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Canada’s war crimes law and other international laws prohibit an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.
Ronald Levy, the lawyer representing the two companies, recently told the Canadian Jewish News that he considers the suit “a media exercise intended to besmirch Israel. They don’t care if they win or not, they just want attention. We consider this an abusive action.”
“The fact that the companies are registered in Quebec is irrelevant,” he said.
Levy has filed three motions arguing that the case is outside a Quebec court’s jurisdiction and that it should be heard in Israel.
But Emily Schaeffer, an Israeli lawyer helping the villagers, said no civil suit has ever been filed in Israel because the Supreme Court there has never ruled on the legality of settlements in the occupied territories, saying instead they are a political issue.
This story reprinted courtesy of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.