Weekly roundup of world briefs

Twitter did not suspend Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader

By Ben Sales

(JTA) — On Friday, reports surfaced that Twitter had appeared to suspend an account belonging to Iran’s vehemently anti-Israel supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But @khamenei_site wasn’t the authoritarian leader’s real account.

The reason for the suspension was that the account had tweeted a photo calling for “revenge” against former President Donald Trump. Along with a photo showing Trump golfing beneath the shadow of a military airplane, the tweet read “Revenge is inevitable. Soleimani’s killer and the man who gave the orders must face vengeance.”

As president, Trump ordered the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the senior Iranian general who commanded a force that had supported terrorist groups across the Middle East.

But Twitter said it suspended the account because it was fake, Reuters reported. Khamenei’s main account, with more than 880,000 followers, was still active.

Twitter told The Associated Press that it had suspended the fake account for violating the platform’s “abusive behavior policy” as well as its “manipulation and spam policy.”

Officials in Israel and the United States have drawn attention to Khamenei’s active account as debates over moderation on Twitter have escalated, and particularly as the platform has restricted and then suspended Trump’s account for inciting violence.

At a hearing last year in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, an Israeli activist asked why a Khamenei tweet calling for Israel’s elimination was allowed, given that a label had been appended to tweets by Trump. A Twitter official responded that “foreign policy saber-rattling on military and economic issues are generally not in violation of Twitter rules.”

Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s press secretary, said the statement spoke to Twitter’s “overwhelming, blinding bias against conservatives and against this president.”

Biden names Massachusetts transportation secretary Steph Pollack to senior roads post

By Ron Kampeas

WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden named Stephanie Pollack, the Massachusetts transportation secretary known for her ability as a Democrat to cross party lines, to help helm the Federal Highway Administration.

Boston media reported on Thursday her appointment as deputy administrator of the Federal Highway Administration, which will take place next week.

Pollack, a progressive Democrat, has worked closely with Republican Gov. Charlie Baker to turn around the state’s notoriously plagued roads system. He praised her on her way out, telling the Boston Herald, “She has provided MassDOT with stability and leadership through the last six years, serving longer than her three predecessors combined.”

Pollard and Baker appeared in 2016 in a video as the Blues Brothers, on a mission to save the T, Boston’s mass transit system. In an interview a year later about her closeness to Barker, she described being an Orthodox Jew in public life.

“Except in the case of emergency situations, I do not make phone calls or send emails on the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays,” she told Commonwealth Magazine at the time. “For me, Sabbath is an electronic timeout that gives me time to think about something other than transportation.”

Hawaiian-Jewish surfer Makua Rothman may have ridden the largest wave of all time

By Gabe Friedman

(JTA) — Hawaiian-Jewish surfing star Makua Rothman may have successfully ridden the largest recorded wave in the history of the sport, estimated to be at least 100 feet tall.

The 36-year-old posted video of the achievement from last Saturday on his YouTube page on Wednesday. Footage starts here around 23:00.

The final estimate of the wave’s height will be announced at the annual XXL surfing awards, which Rothman told a local news channel should occur in May.

Rothman has a Jewish father and a Hawaiian mother and hails from Kahuku, Hawaii. Judaism was not a significant part of his life as a child, but he told the San Diego Jewish World in 2009 that he was drawing closer to the faith.

“God is the ocean. God is the air. God is the sun … Every time I’m out there I give thanks,” he said.

He also said that he is friends with Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, an early Jewish pioneer of the sport who helped popularize it in Israel. Paskowitz brought a young Rothman to Israel for a surfing event that brought Jewish and Arab Israelis together on the waves.

Rothman, who first got on a board at age 2, has been considered one of the best surfers in the world since his teenage years. He is also a professional musician who has toured with Matisyahu and The Wailers, Bob Marley’s former backing band.

Israel boycott activists to teach on anti-Semitism at international social justice summit

By Cnaan Liphshiz

(JTA) — Promoters of boycotts against Israel in Brazil will teach about anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism at an international social justice summit with a history of Jew-hatred.

Activists from the Brazil branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, will give a training seminar on Sunday at the World Social Forum that will “clarify the differences between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, concepts that are frequently equated by Zionist propaganda to criminalize Palestinian resistance to occupation,” BDS Brazil said in a statement.

The World Social Forum was created in 2001 in Brazil as an alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Many of its thousands of participants belong to the far left, as well as promoters of the Palestinian cause, including the BDS movement.

This year’s summit, which will be online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is the first time that activists from the BDS movement are using the summit to teach about anti-Semitism. The movement has faced accusations of being anti-Semitic.

In 2016, the World Social Forum canceled one of its own events on Israel following an outcry over allegedly anti-Semitic imagery used to promote it. Titled “Terrorizm, Wahhabism, Zionism,” the event was advertised with a cartoon of a Jew eating an Uncle Sam.

Germany’s parliament in 2019 called BDS an anti-Semitic movement in a resolution, as has the U.S. State Department.

BDS advocates, including some Jews, defend the movement as a reaction to Israel’s alleged violations of international law, particularly in its treatment of Palestinians.

COVID-19 comment spurs an anti-Semitism complaint filed against head of Belgium’s Jew-mocking Aalst carnival

By Cnaan Liphshiz

(JTA) — Organizers of Belgium’s Aalst carnival have defended the mocking of Jews there as a good-natured satire at a counterculture parade that takes swipes at people of all faiths and races.

But according to a recent complaint submitted to the country’s anti-racism watchdog, the man heading the event in Aalst has made classical anti-Semitic remarks on Facebook, the Het Laatste Nieuws daily of Antwerp reported Thursday.

The complaint to the UNIA watchdog about Aalst Carnival Association Chairman Sven de Smet follows a controversy that led to the Aalst Carnival renouncing its title as a world heritage event.

The 2019 edition of the annual event – a costume party known for its irreverent sphere and provocative costumes — featured several floats deemed anti-Semitic, including ones of Jews depicted as insects. The previous event had a float about the cost of living, with grinning Orthodox Jews holding bags of money and a rat on one of their shoulders.

The complaint by Rudi Roth, a Jewish journalist from Aalst, about de Smet concern a comment that de Smet left on Dec. 29 in a Facebook post featuring a picture of the 2018 display captioned “Hey, Jew, the rules apply to you, too.” The caption referred to violations of COVID-19 emergency measures by haredi Orthodox Jews.

“Nonsense! God’s chosen people,” de Smet wrote. Another carnival enthusiast, Filip Deshommes, replied: “Have a heart. These people went through the Holocaust so they’re always allowed a little bit more than others.”

De Smet has declined to comment on the complaint against him.

Joe Biden’s first Sunday Mass as president involves stop at Jewish deli owned by his COVID czar

By Gabe Friedman

(JTA) — Joe Biden is Irish and Catholic, but his family clearly has a soft spot for Jewish food.

On the way back to the White House from Biden’s first Sunday Mass as president at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church, the family motorcade stopped in the Georgetown neighborhood so that Hunter Biden could get bagels from the Call Your Mother deli, Bloomberg reporter Jordan Fabian tweeted.

The self-described “Jew-ish” eatery serves bagels, sandwiches, bagel sandwiches and smoked fish sides.

The deli is co-owned by Jeff Zients, a Jewish businessman who ran the National Economic Council under President Obama from 2014 to January 2017 and is now Biden’s COVID-19 czar, coordinating the administration’s plans to tackle the virus.

Some of the recipe testing for the deli’s first location was done at Zients’ home, according to Washingtonian magazine. Zients connected with Andrew Dana, the chef behind Call Your Mother and his business partner, through his father’s friend from summer camp.

“Similar to me, he’s from this area and spent a lot of time in New York and has experienced a lot of the great deli culture in New York and wanted D.C. to be able to replicate that,” Dana told the magazine.

Social media users had fun with the tidbit on Sunday. Historian and talking head Michael Beschloss noted that the store’s pastrami is “excellent.”

Walter Bernstein, respected blacklisted screenwriter, dies at 101

By Gabe Friedman

(JTA) — Walter Bernstein, a proudly “secular” Jewish screenwriter best known for his 1960s and ’70s dramas and for being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, has died at 101.

The cause of death on Saturday was pneumonia, his wife Gloria Loomis told The New York Times.

Bernstein, born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, called himself a “secular, self-loving Jew of a leftist persuasion,” according to the Times.

That persuasion got him labeled as a communist sympathizer in the 1950s, when the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee cracked down on leftist attitudes in Hollywood.

Bernstein’s career rebounded in the late ’50s, and he went on to collaborate multiple times with fellow New York Jew Sidney Lumet. His most famous films include “Paris Blues,” a drama about jazz musicians starring Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman; “Fail-Safe,” a Cold War thriller with Henry Fonda and Walter Matthau; and “The Front,” a comedy about the blacklist experience starring Woody Allen and Zero Mostel.

The Times reported that Bernstein was involved in several projects into his 90s and was an adjunct professor at New York University until 2017.

“They’ll carry me off writing,” he once told Variety.

Israel closes its borders, including for citizens and immigrants, in effort to curb COVID-19

By Philissa Cramer

(JTA) — Even as Israel has emerged as the world’s fastest-vaccinating country, its pace of new COVID-19 cases has set records as well.

Now, in a desperate effort to bring the outbreak under control, the country is taking the unprecedented step of completely locking down its borders.

Ben Gurion Airport has been closed to virtually all traffic in both directions. Since March, citizens have been able to travel freely as long as they follow quarantine rules upon entry, but now even they cannot enter or leave the country. (Non-citizens have largely been excluded, though a patchwork of exemptions has allowed some in.)

Even new immigrants, who have continued to arrive during the pandemic despite limits on non-citizen entry, will have to wait until the shutdown ends to travel to the country.

The airport will remain closed for one week, the government announced Sunday. Exactly what impact the travel ban will have on infections is unclear because there are so many cases in Israel already. But new visa-free travel as a consequence of normalization with several Arab nations has proven to be a vector for disease, with one traveler reportedly infecting 180 Israelis on his return from the United Arab Emirates. The shutdown allows a halt on that travel without rolling back the terms of those deals.

Hidden bunker discovered in Warsaw Ghetto

By Hanan Greenwood

(Israel Hayom via JNS) — A bunker containing 100-year-old tefillin (phylacteries) hidden from the Nazis in World War II has been discovered in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.

In recent years, Polish authorities have begun to demolish buildings inside the Warsaw Ghetto to turn them into residential buildings in a process of urban renewal. Following one such demolition, construction workers discovered an entrance to a bunker dug in preparation for the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. One of the Polish construction workers on the site who entered the bunker to clear it out discovered 10 phylacteries that had been hidden behind books and other items.

Hearing of the sensational discovery from their local contacts, European emissaries of the Shem Olam Faith and the Holocaust Institute for Education, Documentation and Research secretly contacted the construction workers. Following lengthy negotiations and a commitment to keep the transaction secret from Polish authorities, the phylacteries were handed over to the emissaries. They recently arrived in Israel, where they were transferred to the institute for disinfection and conservation.

Shem Olam announced that it had the phylacteries ahead of a conference it is set to hold to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The virtual conference, which will be open to the public, will include panels on the memory of the Holocaust from an international perspective and will be attended by politicians, spiritual leaders, rabbis and historians from around the world.

According to Shem Olam director Rabbi Avraham Krieger, “The discovery of 10 phylacteries concentrated in one place testifies to the Jewish lifestyle they maintained in the ghetto. Despite the horrors and the cruel reality in which they lived, they continued to observe the customs and tradition they grew up with.”

He noted that “the number of phylacteries points to the underground minyans [prayer quorums of 10 people] they succeeded in holding inside the bunker, underground and under the Nazis’ noses. The phylacteries were hidden alongside weapons and hunting tools that served the Warsaw Ghetto rebels, which testifies to their importance in the eyes of the Jews.”

This article first appeared in Israel Hayom.

Biden’s top security advisor tells Israeli counterpart he aims to build on accords

(JNS) — The new U.S. national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, talked on the phone with his Israeli counterpart, Meir Ben-Shabbat, on Saturday, according to the National Security Council.

Sullivan “reaffirmed President [Joe] Biden’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security and expressed appreciation for Ben Shabbat’s contributions to our bilateral partnership,” according to NSC spokesperson Emily Horne.

The two discussed opportunities “to enhance the partnership over the coming months, including by building on the success of Israel’s normalization arrangements [Abhraham Accords] with UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco,” according to Horne.

Sullivan also “confirmed the United States will closely consult with Israel on all matters of regional security” and “extended an invitation to begin a strategic dialogue in the near term to continue substantive discussions,” according to Horne.