5776: A Year in Review part 4

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tours the scene of a terrorist attack at Tel Aviv's Sarona Market FLASH 90 PHOTO

June 2016

 Jeremy Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn

• British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, already under fire over allegations of rampant anti-Semitism in his party, draws more criticism for seeming to compare Israel and the Islamic State terrorist group. “Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those of various self-styled Islamic states or organizations,” Corbyn says following the release of a report on anti-Semitism within Labour. The report found the party is not overrun by anti-Semitism but that there is an “occasionally toxic atmosphere.”

• Prime Minister Justin Trudeau moves to replace Canada’s ambassador to Israel with a career civil servant. Lawyer Vivian Bercovici, who was appointed by Trudeau’s predecessor, Stephen Harper, will be succeeded  by Deborah Lyons, Canada’s current ambassador to Afghanistan.

• A devastating Palestinian terror attack leaves four Israelis dead at the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv.

• By a margin of 4-1, with chassidic councillor Mindy Pollak being the sole dissenter, the Outremont council votes in favour of a bylaw prohibiting any additional synagogues, churches, mosques or other religious institutions on Bernard and Laurier avenues. A similar ban has been in effect on another commercial street, Van Horne Avenue, since 1999. The council says the aim is to revitalize these streets, which are filled with restaurants and shops whose business has been suffering.

• The Green Party of Canada considers two resolutions, advanced by party members and not yet policy, that call on the Green party to urge the Canada Revenue Agency to revoke the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund and to support a boycott, divestment and sanctions policy.

Green Leader Elizabeth May says her party values “grass-roots democracy,” and that the resolutions process does not include any “co-ordinated vetting.” She says she will not support the resolutions.

• Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre and Toronto Mayor John Tory announce that they will lead an economic mission to Israel and the West Bank in the fall.

• Hallel Yaffa Ariel, 13, is stabbed to death while sleeping in her bed in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba by a Palestinian teenager. The attacker, Muhammad Nasser Tarayrah, had jumped the settlement fence and entered the sleeping girl’s bedroom. He is later shot and killed by civilian guards.

• Israel and Turkey sign a reconciliation agreement six years after relations were cut off following an Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship attempting to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Nine Turkish citizens were killed in the raid.

• Anti-Semitic incidents on American college campuses nearly doubled in 2015, the Anti-Defamation League reports. A total of 90 incidents were reported on 60 college campuses in 2015, compared with 47 incidents on 43 campuses in 2014. The ADL audit records a total of 941 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2015, an increase of three per cent over the previous year.

READ: 5776 -THE YEAR IN REVIEW

July 2016

• Jewish groups in Canada express disappointment after the Supreme Court rejects the federal government’s appeal in a case to revoke the citizenship of former Nazi Helmut Oberlander. The Supreme Court rules that it will not hear the government’s appeal of a lower court judgment that orders the government to reconsider its decision to revoke Oberlander’s Canadian citizenship.

 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Auschwitz.  AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU STATE MUSEUM PHOTO
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Auschwitz. AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU STATE MUSEUM PHOTO

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visits Auschwitz-Birkenau where he tours the grounds alongside 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Nate Leipciger of Toronto, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion, and International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland.

  Pope Francis visits Auschwitz, where he prays and meets with Holocaust survivors. Pope Francis also visits the cell of Polish priest and saint Maximilian Kolbe, who died at Auschwitz after taking the place of a condemned man. He is the third pope to visit the camp, following the Polish-born John Paul II in 1979 and Pope Benedict XVI in 2006.

• Debbie Wasserman Schultz steps down as leader of the Democratic National Committee in the United States following the emergence of emails showing senior DNC staffers sought to undercut the campaign of Jewish presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.

 Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel

• Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, author, activist and Holocaust survivor, dies at 87 of natural causes. Wiesel, who wrote Night and The Jews of Silence, was well known internationally for his books and as a leading voice of conscience.

• Goldie Michelson of Worcester, Mass., the oldest living American, dies at home at the age of 113 and 11 months. Michelson, the daughter of Russian Jewish parents, immigrated with her family to Worcester when she was two years old.

• Israel’s highest rabbinical court rejects a conversion performed by a prominent American rabbi Haskel Lookstein. The conversion had been rejected originally in April by a court in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petach Tikvah. Rabbi Lookstein, the former rabbi of Kehilath Jeshurun, a modern Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, performed the conversion of Ivanka Trump, daughter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

READ: A YEAR IN REVIEW: THE COMPELLING STORIES OF 5776 – PART 2

August 2016

• Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Deri and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan announce the launch of a new inter-ministerial committee to bar anti-Israel activists from entering the country and deport those already in the country.

• Federal Green party Leader Elizabeth May contemplates stepping down from her role after party members voted to adopt a policy in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, despite her vocal opposition to it. She later chooses to stay on as party leader.

• Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre attempts to distance his administration from anti-Israel and what Jewish groups described as anti-Semitic content at the World Social Forum, but falls short of condemning the international event as a whole. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, B’nai Brith Canada and Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center had appealed to Coderre to dissociate the city from the six-day event.

• Israeli judoka Or Sasson gets snubbed at the Rio Olympics by an Egyptian opponent who refuses to shake his hand after the fight. Also, a female Saudi Arabian judoka forfeits her match against an Israeli opponent.

• Rumours circulate that Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered to host Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an effort to revive stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

• The Movement for Black Lives adopts a platform describing Israel as an “apartheid state” and claims Israel perpetrates “genocide” against the Palestinian people. The group, a coalition of 50 organizations that emerged from the Black Lives Matter movement, is harshly criticized by Jewish organizations.

• Gene Wilder, the comedic actor who played the title characters in the films Young Frankenstein and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and also starred in Mel Brooks’ Western spoof Blazing Saddles, dies at 83.

• Israeli activist Gilad Paz, 34, seeks asylum in Canada, claiming he fears persecution for his support of the BDS campaign.

• Politicians, officials, friends and others pay tribute to former Israeli defence minister and Labor party leader Binyamin Ben-Eliezer following his death on Aug. 28.

READ: 5776: A YEAR IN REVIEW PART 3

September 2016

• A video showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that dismantling Jewish West Bank settlements in the framework of a peace deal is akin to “ethnic cleansing” goes viral and earns a stern rebuke from the U.S.

• Former Israeli president Shimon Peres suffers a massive stroke. He dies two weeks later.