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British Jewish Teens Place Posters of Remaining Hamas Hostages on Train Tracks Outside Auschwitz
British teens placed pictures of Israeli hostages seized by Hamas on the train tracks leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Nazi death camp. Photo: JRoots
During a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau this week, a group of Jewish school students from the UK placed photos of the nearly 200 remaining hostages held by the Hamas terror group in Gaza on the train tracks leading up to the gates of the Nazis’ largest death camp.
Zak Jeffay — director of Jewish education at JRoots, which organized the trip to Poland for students from London’s JFS — said Auschwitz was the “ultimate symbol” of Jew-hatred and as such it made sense to pay tribute to the Israeli hostages outside the death camp.
“One of the big topics students grapple with time and time again is understanding where the antisemitism of 80 years ago fits into what we’re experiencing and understanding today,” Jeffay told The Algemeiner.
“The murder and kidnapping of Jews today is happening against the backdrop of what we describe when we tell the story of the 1.1 million Jews in Auschwitz,” he added.
According to Talia Giffin, a teacher at the school, placing the images of the hostages served as a “strong reminder to students that unfortunately we’re still living in times of people hating Jews for no reason.”
Being confronted with the faces of the hostages before entering the Nazi concentration camp was “a stark reminder that all of these things are still going on and that what happened on Oct. 7 was no different to the horrific things that occurred in World War II,” Giffin told The Algemeiner.
Giffin added that the move also symbolized the “inseparable” connection between Israel and Judaism.
“It negates any argument trying to separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism. It showed clear as day that hating Israel is hating Jews — they are one and the same. It’s really important to teach that to our students,” she said.
British teens placed pictures of Israeli hostages seized by Hamas on the train tracks leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Nazi death camp. Photo: JRoots
There has been a global surge in antisemitism since Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, with the US and several European countries experiencing record numbers of antisemitic incidents. Holocaust survivors from across the world have released powerful testimonies saying they feel unsafe for the second time in their lives since the Oct. 7 onslaught, in which Palestinian terrorists led by Hamas killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped over 240 others as hostages.
There are currently just under 200 people remaining in captivity in Hamas-ruled Gaza following a ceasefire deal in which dozens of the hostages taken last month were released.
During the six-day trip to Auschwitz, the biggest death camp of the Holocaust, the students also visited Jewish sites in Warsaw, Lublin, and Krakow.
Menucha Sampson, a 17-year-old student at the school, said the decision to place the images of the hostages on the train tracks brought a “detached history back to the present day.”
Another student, Jake Kushner, 17, said: “The Holocaust ended but that hasn’t stopped antisemitism growing. People have no limits when it comes to attacking Jews.”
But despite the horrors of both the past and the present, the trip ended on a note of optimism, he said.
“By the end of it, we were walking out [of the camp] singing Am Yisrael Chai (“the nation of Israel lives”), and that showed they’ll never actually succeed,” Kushner said.
The post British Jewish Teens Place Posters of Remaining Hamas Hostages on Train Tracks Outside Auschwitz first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Iran Says Eight Arrested for Suspected Links to Israel’s Mossad Spy Agency
The Mossad recruitment ad. Photo: Screenshot.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday they had arrested eight people suspected of trying to transmit the coordinates of sensitive sites and details about senior military figures to Israel’s Mossad, Iranian state media reported.
They are accused of having provided the information to the Mossad spy agency during Israel’s air war on Iran in June, when it attacked Iranian nuclear facilities and killed top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
A Guards statement alleged that the suspects had received specialized training from Mossad via online platforms. It said they were apprehended in northeastern Iran before carrying out their plans, and that materials for making launchers, bombs, explosives and booby traps had been seized.
State media reported earlier this month that Iranian police had arrested as many as 21,000 “suspects” during the 12-day war with Israel, though they did not say what these people had been suspected of doing.
Security forces conducted a campaign of widespread arrests and also stepped up their street presence during the brief war that ended in a US-brokered ceasefire.
Iran has executed at least eight people in recent months, including nuclear scientist Rouzbeh Vadi, hanged on August 9 for passing information to Israel about another scientist killed in Israeli airstrikes.
Human rights groups say Iran uses espionage charges and fast-tracked executions as tools for broader political repression.
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Body of Idan Shtivi, Murdered on Oct. 7, Retrieved from Gaza in Special IDF Operation
Idan Shtivi. Photo: Courtesy of the family
i24 News – The body of Idan Shtivi, a 28-year-old murdered by Palestinian jihadists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, was recovered in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet in central Gaza, it was cleared for publication on Saturday.
Shtivi’s remains were returned to Israel alongside the body of Ilan Weiss, another hostage killed during the October 7 massacre.
“Idan Shtivi was abducted from the Tel Gama area and brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists after acting to rescue and evacuate others from the Nova music festival on October 7th, 2023. He was 28 years old at the time of his death,” read an IDF press release.
“Following an identification process conducted at the National Center for Forensic Medicine, along with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, the Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters notified his family.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Shviti “was a gifted student of sustainability and governance, and a courageous individual” who acted heroically on October 7, helping others flee.
“He was killed in the process and his body was abducted to Gaza by Hamas. My wife and I send our heartfelt condolences to the Shtivi family. So far, 207 hostages have been returned, 148 of them alive. We will continue to act tirelessly and decisively to bring back all our hostages—living and deceased.”
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Woman Stabbed at Ottawa Grocery Store in Latest Antisemitic Attack
A social media post by the alleged attacker, Joseph Rooke of Cornwall, Ontario. Photo: Screenshot via i24
i24 News – The stabbing of a Jewish woman at an Ottawa grocery by a man with a long history of antisemitic posts on social media, the latest antisemitic hate crime in Canada, sparked outrage and prompted condemnation from officials including the prime minister.
Both the victim and the attacker are in their 70s. The woman is reportedly in serious condition.
The suspect was identified as Joseph Rooke, who has authored a series of lengthy rambling screeds on social media, ranting against Israel and Jews.
“Judaism is the world’s oldest cult,” he writes in one post, going on to say “over time jews have become insidious in governments, businesses, media conglomerates, and educational institutions in order to do what they do better than anyone else. Jews are the world’s masters of propaganda, gaslighting, demonization, demagoguery, and outright lying. Using their collective wealth they have become masters of reprisal.”
“I am under no obligation whatsoever, legal, moral, or otherwise, to like jews and I do not. If that means I meet the jewish definition of an anti-semite, so be it.”
Canada has seen a steep spike in antisemitic attacks over the past two years, including a recent incident in Montreal where a Hasidic Jew was beaten in front on his children.
After Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned the incident, many, including former Israel’s ambassador the US Michael Oren, pointed out that Carney’s rhetoric and policies contribute to the increasing insecurity of Canada’s Jewish community through uncritical embrace of outrageous and easily disprovable allegations that Israel and its supporters were guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.