Dan Quayle urged President Obama to release imprisoned spy-for-Israel Jonathan Pollard. Quayle, who was U.S. vice president from 1989 to 1993, is the highest-ranking former official to call for the release of Pollard, the civilian U.S. Navy analyst who was sentenced to life in 1987.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), a pro-Israel stalwart with close ties to the U.S. intelligence community, is quitting Congress. Harman reportedly is leaving to run the Washington DC- based Woodrow Wilson Center, a preeminent foreign policy think tank.
Birthright Israel has launched an effort to reclaim the word Zionism from Israel\’s detractors. The effort, launched last week in New York with speeches by Israeli U.S. Ambassador Michael Oren and Birthright funder Michael Steinhardt, drew several hundred alumni of Birthright Israel, the philanthropic effort that has brought hundreds of thousands of young Diaspora Jews on free trips to the Jewish state.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has hired a new spokesman. Ari Goldberg, currently the spokesman for the U.S. government overseas broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, will replace Josh Block, who left AIPAC in October to start a consultancy with Lanny Davis, a leading Democratic lawyer. Goldberg will start his new post near the end of February.
Philanthropist Alan Slifka, founder of the Abraham Fund, has died. Slifka died Feb. 4 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81. Slifka founded the Abraham Fund in 1989. The fund, which he ran with the late Haifa University professor Eugene Weiner, is a nonprofit dedicated to advancing coexistence and equality between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens.
A Jerusalem committee approved construction plans for 13 new apartments for Jewish residents in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The city\’s municipal planning and construction committee approved private plans for two apartment buildings to be constructed near the tomb of Shimon HaTzadik, a Jewish high priest during the time of the Second Temple. The Interior Ministry gives the final go-ahead to the project.
They were looking to move anyway, said Stephanie Butler. And the $50,000 incentive being offered by Temple Emanu-El in Dothan, Ala., to young Jewish families willing to relocate helped tip the scales. “We never would have looked at Dothan if not for this program,” she said.
A Hamas prisoner who escaped from an Egyptian prison during the recent unrest returned to Gaza. Ayman Nofal, 34, who was arrested three years ago in the Sinai Peninsula and accused of planning bomb attacks, was given a hero\’s welcome in his hometown in central Gaza on Sunday.
Mass flash flooding triggered by Cyclone Yasi caused severe damage to Jewish community buildings in Melbourne. Floods stormed through several suburbs heavily populated by Melbourne’s Jewish community of 50,000 on the evening of Feb. 4, prompting the closure of the Sephardi Synagogue on Shabbat.
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