The largest settlement to date in the Bernard Madoff multi-billion dollar Ponzi scandal has been approved by a U.S. judge today, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Filmmaker Rob Lemkin’s most famous relative is the late Raphael Lemkin, a Polish attorney who spent his life crusading against mass murder and who invented the term “genocide” to describe what the Nazis had done to the Jews, including 40 members of his family. Rob Lemkin never knew Raphael Lemkin, a distant cousin who died before Rob was born. But the elder Lemkin’s legacy has motivated much of the filmmaker’s work, notably his documentary “Enemies of the People,” an exposé on the Cambodian genocide that claimed two-million lives during the Pol Pot regime of the 1970s. Co-authored with Teth Sambath, the groundbreaking film – which culminates with a confession by Pol Pot’s second-in-command, Nuon Chea – is short-listed for the Academy Award and has received a Writers Guild Award nomination.
The number of Jewish households in the greater Baltimore has grown substantially in the past dozen years. A new demographic study of the Baltimore Jewish community also shows that Baltimore\’s Jewish population has jumped by 2,000 people since the last survey, conducted in 1999. Baltimore is home to 93,400 Jews, according to the 2010 Greater Baltimore Jewish Community Study conducted by Ukeles Associates on behalf of the Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore.
Journalist and author Lisa Alcalay Klug flew across the country this month to present at Limmud NY, the annual New York version of the worldwide Jewish learning extravaganza. The Jan. 14-17 conference in upstate New York will be Klug’s seventh Limmud gathering in 12 months. Like the hundreds of other Limmud presenters whose paths she crosses, she doesn’t get paid for her time. “I’ve met amazing people, developed new friendships and reinforced past relationships,” said Klug, who splits her time in California, New York and Israel. “My world has grown exponentially because of it.”
In a landmark case, a Jewish burial society employee in Scotland says he was fired for becoming involved with the Masorti movement. It marked the first case of a Jewish individual claiming discrimination against a Jewish employer in Scotland, according to the Herald Scotland newspaper. Warren Bader, 49, said in a preliminary discrimination hearing that he was dismissed by the Glasgow Hebrew Burial Society after he helped set up Masorti Scotland in a Jewish community that is largely Orthodox.
Israel and Greece agreed to set up a regional force to deal with natural disasters following a meeting between the foreign ministers of the two countries. Avigdor Lieberman arrived in Greece Wednesday on the first official visit by an Israeli foreign minister in 15 years. Greece said it would organize the regional force and has invited the Palestinian Authority and other countries in the region such as Turkey, Egypt and Jordan to join the effort. The force comes in response to the Carmel Forest fire in northern Israe last December; Greece was among the countries to assist in quelling the blaze.
As I was driving to one speech last night, I was listening to another in my car. “Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame,” President Obama said in the aftermath of the violence in Tucson, “let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” Uplifting words, and good advice for those of us hurting on the sidelines – those of us hoping for news of the next uptick in Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford’s condition, or wishing we could just stop thinking about the guns, hatred and accusations of “blood libel” — images that keep hitting us like the aftershocks of a emotional earthquake. Good advice, particularly if you’re sitting on the sidelines, feeling the pain and sharing the experience vicariously, through news reports, and wondering what you can do to help.
A volunteer at a private Holocaust archives in Texas was arrested for stealing documents and selling them online. Mansal Denton, 20, was a volunteer for a year-and-a-half at the Mazal Holocaust Library in San Antonio of the largest privately held Holocaust archives in the world, the Houston Chronicle reported. Retired Mexico City businessman Harry Mazal, 73, owns the archives. He reportedly spent $1 million collecting the documents.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.