Syria is in the midst of a civil war. The common wisdom both from inside and out is that the Assad dynasty is doomed to follow the plight of Ben Ali in Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt, and Gadhafi in Libya, not to mention Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The questions are how, when and how many more dead.
I am often asked: “Why are you so preoccupied with the problem of get refusal. Have you ever been an agunah?” The term agunah broadly refers to a Jewish woman who is “chained” or “anchored” to a dead marriage, rendering her unable to remarry, because her husband refuses to give her a Jewish bill of divorce, or get.
Heart disease and stroke have reached epidemic levels in our country. Heart disease is the leading killer of Americans; stroke is the fourth leading killer. One of every three deaths in this county is caused by cardiovascular disease.
Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel said Mitt Romney should speak up about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints\’ practice of posthumous baptisms. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Wiesel said that Romney, the front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nod, should tell his church to “stop” performing posthumous proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed Iran for attacks on Israeli embassy staff in Georgia and India on Monday Feb. 13 that wounded at least two people. \”Iran is behind these attacks. It is the biggest exporter of terror in the world,\” Netanyahu told members of his Likud party. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland seemed much on the same wavelength two days later.
Liselotte Hanock — née Ortner — was sent by her grandmother to buy food on a cold, rainy November afternoon in 1944. She was wearing only a light raincoat when she left her yellow-star apartment in Budapest — a de facto ghetto, where she lived with her paternal grandparents and two other families. Suddenly, she was approached by a group of Arrow Cross soldiers — boys 16 to 18 years old carrying rifles. “Come with us,” they said. Liselotte, who was just 11, knew not to resist.
A delegation from Israel\’s Defense Ministry visited eastern Turkey to dedicate a student village built with Israeli assistance. The student village in Turkey\’s Van district was built from 130 prefabricated buildings sent by Israel as a humanitarian gesture following an earthquake three months ago that left some six hundred dead and thousands homeless.
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