February 9, 2020

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israeli President Reuven Rivlin asked the president of Peru to grant clemency to an Israeli woman imprisoned there for drug smuggling.

Hodaya Monsonego, 24, was arrested in 2019 after Peruvian authorities found 28 kilograms of cocaine in her luggage as she prepared to return to Israel.

Rivlin said in a letter sent over the weekend to Peru’s President Martin Alberto Vizcarra Cornejo that Monsongo has medical and mental health issues, including a diagnosis of limited cognitive ability, that could have caused her to be involved in the alleged matter unintentionally.

Monsongo has no criminal record in Israel, Rivlin said, adding that she speaks only Hebrew and has found it difficult to communicate with her local lawyers. He appealed to Cornejo’s “mercy and compassion.”

Rivlin’s request comes days after Russian President Vladimir Putin pardoned Israeli backpacker Naama Issachar, who had been sentenced to seven and a half years in jail on a drug-smuggling conviction after being arrested for having 9 grams of marijuana in her suitcase. Issachar became a cause célèbre in Israel, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lobbying Putin for her release and flying to Moscow to personally bring her home. Rivlin also had pressed Putin for Issachar’s release.

Monsongo’s brother, Maor, in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12, called on Netanyahu to get involved in his sister’s case. He said that her original destination was Madrid, and then she was taken instead to Lima by the friend with whom she was traveling.

“In most of our conversations with her, she cries. She is very frustrated that they do not understand her and she does not understand their language,” he said.

AMSTERDAM (JTA) – A Dutch city that in 2014 agreed to change street signs identifying Israeli cities as Palestinian postponed the correction indefinitely.

A spokesperson of the municipality of Eindhoven in the eastern Netherlands on Friday wrote on Twitter that the signs that identify the cities as being located in Palestine would be changed — “but in the framework of regular replacement, which is now not on the table.”

The city agreed to change the signs in 2014 following an outcry by Dutch Jews and Israel advocates, including Likoed Nederland, which complained the designation was politicized and intended to “wipe Israel off the map.” The cities referred to on the street signs include Jerusalem, Nazareth and Tiberias.

On Friday, the municipal spokesperson said the reference to Palestine was to “biblical Palestine.” The spokesperson was replying to renewed criticism on Twitter by Esther Voet, editor-in-chief of the NIW Dutch-Jewish weekly, and others.

The New Testament does not mention Palestine. The Hebrew Bible, which many Dutch Christians view as equal in its significance to the New Testament, does not mention Palestine either. It does speak of Pleshet — lands inhabited by the Philistines, an extinct non-Semitic coastal people that lived in the west of the Land of Israel in the 12th century B.C.E.

JERUSALAM (JTA) — Any unilateral Israeli action toward annexing West Bank territory could endanger the Trump administration’s peace plan, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman warned in a two-part tweet Sunday.

Friedman wrote that the United States needs to approve any annexation plans before Israel takes action:

David M. Friedman
✔
@USAmbIsrael
· 11h
President Trump’s Vision for Peace is the product of more than three years of close consultations among the President, PM Netanyahu and their respective senior staff. As we have stated, the application of Israeli law to the territory which the Plan provides to be part of

David M. Friedman
✔
@USAmbIsrael
Israel is subject to the completion a mapping process by a joint Israeli-American committee. Any unilateral action in advance of the completion of the committee process endangers the Plan & American recognition.

203
12:22 AM – Feb 9, 2020
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Friedman’s tweets came hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Israel had begun taking steps toward annexation.

“We are already at the height of the process of mapping the area that, according to the Trump plan, will become part of the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said at a campaign event Saturday night in Ma’ale Adumim, a West Bank city near Jerusalem that would be annexed under Trump’s plan. “It won’t take too long.”

Friedman’s tweet also signaled a complete reversal of the ambassador’s earlier support for immediate annexation of the West Bank and Jordan Valley. He had told reporters at the White House immediately after the announcement that Israel could, in his view, “annex settlements at any time” and that the country “should not wait at all” to do so.

He began walking those comments back the following day, saying it is a “process that requires some effort,” and that Israel would first need to present detailed maps before the United States would approve such a move. Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and the plan’s architect, has said Israel should wait until after next month’s elections before taking action.

Under the plan, the United States would approve of Israel annexing about 30 percent of the West Bank, including all of the Jewish settlements and the Jordan Valley.

BERLIN (JTA) – Neo-Nazis are attacking a popular German comedian for having apologized to a Holocaust survivor for his father’s wartime crimes.

Atze Schröder, 54, addressed Auschwitz survivor Eva Szepesi on the popular Markus Lanz talk show Thursday, telling her tearfully that his father, who was drafted into the Nazi army in 1941 and served four years, had “done horrible things as a soldier. … He told me about them later.” His father died nine years ago at the age of 87.

Right-wing extremists have since been taunting Schröder on social media. Among the less offensive epithets they’ve used are “mentally impotent rat” and “embarrassing, disgusting slave to the system,” Germany’s RND news website reported.

But fans of Schröder have been applauding his spontaneous outreach to Szepesi, 87, who had shared her recollections of Auschwitz with the talk-show audience during a broadcast timed to the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation. She was accompanied by her daughter, Anita Schwarz.

Moved by Szepesi’s testimony, Schröder said his father “would probably apologize if he were sitting here.” He then stood, faced Szepesi, and reached out his hand, saying, “I am sorry. We must never forget.”

Szepesi later told German news media that she had found Schröder’s gesture “absolutely extraordinary.”

Schröder told the talk show guests that there were “many tragedies in our family that were swept under the rug.” Several relatives, including his grandmother and several uncles, committed suicide after Nazi Germany’s capitulation.

One day after the broadcast, he told the Bild Zeitung newspaper that his father had been a Wehrmacht tank driver and did not belong to a political party. Captured by the Red Army towards the end of the war, Schröder said, he spent six years in a Soviet prisoner of war camp, where he was forced to work in mines. Schröder told Bild his apology was on behalf of his father, for the war crimes committed by Wehrmacht soldiers.

JERUSALEM (JTA) — One of the 12 soldiers injured in the car-ramming attack in Jerusalem last week is a “lone soldier” from San Diego.

Ori Hamond was in Jerusalem with other soldiers for an early-morning swearing-in ceremony to the elite Golani Brigade when the attack took place early Thursday morning next to the popular First Station entertainment center.

Hamond, who was identified Sunday by the Jewish Agency for Israel, made aliyah last year as part of the Israeli Scouts movement and joined the Israel Defense Forces in November. In doing so, he became one of thousands of lone soldiers, IDF members who are serving despite not having grown up in Israel.

On Friday, Jewish Agency Chairman Isaac Herzog met Ori’s mother, Hagit Cohen-Hamo, at the San Diego Jewish Academy, where she teaches Hebrew and where Ori attended school. Herzog offered Cohen-Hamo moral support and the two planted a tree on the grounds of the school joined by students.

Cohen-Hamo said she spoke to her son hours before the attack and had asked him to wear warm clothes to protect him from the cold, never thinking that he would need other protection. She later boarded a plane for Israel to be at her son’s bedside.

On Sunday morning, Ori — who in 2016 launched an online petition “to prove the legitimacy of the Jewish claim to Jerusalem” that netted more than 4,000 signatories — remained hospitalized in Jerusalem. His father, Kobi, had arrived in Israel prior to the attack in order to surprise his son at his Western Wall swearing-in ceremony and was with him at the hospital.

A crowdfunding campaign set up to raise $1,800 to pay for Cohen-Hamo to travel to Israel was closed after raising $10,000 in about 24 hours.