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Tunisia’s Jewish pilgrimage and Tuesday’s shooting, explained
(JTA) — When a security official opened fire outside a Tunisian synagogue during a pilgrimage on Tuesday night, killing two Jewish pilgrims and two security guards, he shattered what was meant to be a day of sacred celebration for the country’s Jews and their compatriots around the world.
The shooting at the synagogue in Djerba, an island in Tunisia, is the deadliest attack on the holy site in more than 20 years. It brought tragedy to a public celebration of Jewish life at Africa’s oldest Jewish house of worship.
Here’s an introduction to the Jews of Tunisia, the annual pilgrimage to Djerba and how the community is reacting to Tuesday’s attack.
Who are the Jews of Tunisia?
Jews have lived in Tunisia since ancient times. Archaeological evidence has shown that there was a Jewish community in the area that once surrounded the Roman city of Carthage, and Jewish life continued to exist there as the territory was conquered by Muslim empires, France and Nazi Germany. During the Holocaust, the Nazis seized Jewish property, put thousands of Jews in forced labor camps and persecuted them in other ways.
Tunisia gained independence in 1956. During and after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, Jews endured an increasingly hostile environment, including antisemitic riots and the torching of a synagogue in Tunis. In the years that followed, the vast majority of the country’s Jews emigrated, shrinking a Jewish population that once may have numbered more than 100,000 to around 1,000-1,500 today.
What is the Djerba synagogue, and why does it host an annual pilgrimage?
Tradition has it that the synagogue on the island of Djerba was founded at the time of the destruction of the First or Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in either 586 BCE or 70 C.E., and contains a stone from the temple. Today the synagogue, which was rebuilt in the 19th century, has rows of benches, brilliant white-and-blue arches as well as an outdoor arcade and other resplendent design features.
The synagogue’s name, El Ghriba, means “the isolated one” and comes from another legend. According to “A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations,” published in 2013, local Jews long ago found the body of a girl who lived and died alone — but whose body was miraculously preserved.
That incident was also the inspiration for the annual pilgrimage on the holiday of Lag B’Omer, which takes place each spring, a little more than a month after the beginning of Passover. Pilgrims who come to the synagogue pray, dance, sing, feast, light candles and write their wishes on hard-boiled eggs.
In the 1990s, the pilgrimage attracted some 10,000 people, according to a report in The Conversation, and attracts thousands today. Since 2011, Israelis have been able to enter the country for the pilgrimage even though Israel and Tunisia do not maintain diplomatic relations. Attendance dipped in the years following the 2011 Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia, and the pilgrimage was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Djerba Jew praying at the El Ghriba Synagogue in 2012. (Wikimedia Commons)
Has the synagogue ever been attacked before?
Yes. In 2002, al-Qaeda set off a truck bomb near the synagogue that killed 20 people, most of them German tourists, about six weeks before the pilgrimage. Tunisia’s government denounced the attack and paid to restore the damage.
And in 2018, five men were arrested in connection with a firebomb attack at the synagogue. A suspicious fire also broke out at the synagogue in 1979.
How will this attack affect the pilgrimage?
Tuesday’s attack, and the fact that it was perpetrated by a security official, have led to despair among current and former pilgrims to the synagogue. Avi Chana, who has gone on the pilgrimage, told the Times of Israel, “I think it’s a death blow, at least for the foreseeable future, to a beautiful tradition and pilgrimage, and it is causing palpable pain. This is dealing the pilgrimage a mortal blow.” Another former pilgrim opted not to organize a group this year out of fears of an attack.
Tunisian President Kais Saied, who has been accused of gutting Tunisia’s democracy, is seeking to reassure future visitors that the country will be safe, and condemned the attack as “criminal and cowardly.”
“I want to reassure the Tunisian people and the whole world that Tunisia will remain safe despite this type of attempt intended to disturb its stability,” Saied said, according to the Times of Israel.
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The post Tunisia’s Jewish pilgrimage and Tuesday’s shooting, explained appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Netanyahu pushes back on Vance’s claims that US is Israel’s ‘only powerful ally’
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected Vice President JD Vance’s recent claims that the U.S. is Israel’s “only powerful ally” left in the world.
When asked on Fox News Sunday what his reaction was to Vance’s remarks, which came as Israeli ministers criticized the framework deal signed by the U.S. and Iran to end hostilities, Netanyahu replied, “I respect JD Vance. We have a very good relationship, but that doesn’t mean that I agree with everything that he says.”
“I have to point out this: Donald Trump is a great, the greatest friend we ever had in the White House, and I stand by that completely,” Netanyahu continued. “Secondly, we have some other friends, like a small country called India, you know, it has 1.4 billion people, and boy, do we have a tremendous support there.”
Netanyahu added that Israel also has the support of “many others,” but did not elaborate on which countries he was referring to.
“The relations are not quite as they appear, and we have, we have many, many friends, and I have to tell you, we also take care of our friends, especially the Christians in the Middle East,” Netanyahu said.
The prime minister also dismissed the claim that there was any rift between the United States and Israel regarding the deal with Iran, telling Fox that he and President Donald Trump were “set on the same goal.”
“President Trump is the leader of the United States. He does what’s good for America. I’m the leader of Israel, the one and only Jewish state. I do what’s good for Israel,” Netanyahu said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, we see eye to eye, but as any, in any family, in any close friendship, there are sometimes differences of opinion, and we discuss them openly.”
Netanyahu also said that he and Trump have “common objectives” regarding the U.S. deal with Iran.
“We want to see Iran give up its nuclear weapons program. We want to see the nuclear enriched material removed. We want to see the enrichment sites for nuclear material dismantled,” Netanyahu said, adding, “as long as I’m prime minister, Iran will not have nuclear weapons.”
On Saturday, Trump told Axios that Netanyahu had requested a meeting at the White House and said that the pair gets along “very good” and that the Israeli leader “knows who the boss is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netanyahu pushes back on Vance’s claims that US is Israel’s ‘only powerful ally’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Former Israeli hostages Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen wed in emotional ceremony
(JTA) — Two former Israeli hostages have wed, in the first marriage of hostages taken when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen were visiting Trufanov’s family on Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7 when they were attacked and abducted to Gaza. Trufanov’s father was murdered. Cohen was freed during a temporary ceasefire after 55 days, while Trufanov was held for nearly 500 days.
They married on Sunday in Israel, in a ceremony attended by multiple former hostages as well as Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who posted a picture of himself under the chuppah, or wedding canopy, with Trufanov and Cohen.
“We prayed for your return, we were moved to tears when you came back home, and this evening we were privileged to rejoice together with you and to bless you under the chuppah on your joyous day,” Herzog wrote.
While other freed hostages have celebrated births and engagements, the wedding is the first for a former hostage. It comes just days after Israel marked the 1,000th day since Oct. 7, and as the government’s handling of the hostage crisis continues to roil Israeli politics ahead of a looming election. Last week, Nitzan Alon, an Israeli army major general who was part of a small hostage negotiation team, said at a conference that more hostages could have been returned alive had the Israeli government made different decisions, strengthening a widespread belief within Israel.
Alon, too, was present at Trufanov and Cohen’s wedding.
After Trufanov stepped on a glass, the traditional signal for the execution of the marriage, Eyal Golan’s “Am Yisrael Chai,” an anthem of Jewish and Israeli solidarity during the Gaza war, began playing.
Rom Braslavski, another hostage who was briefly held with Trufanov in Gaza, posted pictures of himself with his friend at the wedding, as well as a video of him and the newly married couple being hoisted to dance.
“Today, we are together, not in Rafah, not stuffed in a trunk, but free and you are in a beautiful groom’s suit marrying Sapir. How much you talked about her, my brother,” he wrote on Instagram. “There is nothing happier for me than accompanying you on this day, and I hope both of you will bring into the world happy little children and that they won’t know evil. May they not know war, with God’s help.”
Another wedding featuring a former hostage is scheduled for next month. Eliya Cohen, who was held for 505 days, marked his engagement to Ziv Abud in a party that took place last week. He wore a jacket that read “Bring them Home” when other grooms wore it during the hostage crisis. With all hostages out of Gaza since January, Cohen altered it to read “Dad, thank you,” a mantra that he said sustained him during his captivity.
Cohen did not know that Abud had survived the attack on the Nova music festival until after his release. While he was held hostage, she drew attention to his plight by setting a romantic table with an unfilled place on the boardwalk in Tel Aviv.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Former Israeli hostages Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen wed in emotional ceremony appeared first on The Forward.
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Hundreds of Patriot Front members march in Washington on July 4, alarming Jewish groups
(JTA) — Hundreds of people affiliated with the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, in a July 4 show of force by the group founded by a veteran of a landmark 2017 far-right rally that featured an antisemitic chant.
The marchers in Washington wore masks and some carried Confederate flags, according to reports and video from the scene. At times, they chanted “Reclaim America!” — a rallying cry channeling the group’s nativist agenda.
While Patriot Front’s public activities mostly center on its anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ agenda, the Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly cited the group, founded in 2017, as the largest purveyor of antisemitic materials in the United States.
One of the group’s signature slogans, which members displayed on a banner in Washington in 2023, is “No Zionists in Government.”
The previous year, the group’s internal communications, obtained and leaked by an independent media collective, showed that some members used Nazi slogans and that one member was accepted on the basis of an application in which he declared that the “biggest threat to America is Jewish domination over the world.” Group leaders criticized how the chat logs had been obtained but did not challenge the veracity of their contents.
In a statement on Sunday, the ADL called Patriot Front “the most visible white supremacist group operating in the U.S. today” and noted that its previous public rallies had been much smaller.
“The size of the march is concerning,” the ADL said about the Saturday rally.
Patriot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau, was a leading participant in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which attendees chanted “Jews will not replace us” while carrying burning torches. The chant refers to an antisemitic conspiracy theory positing that Jews are engineering mass immigration in order to displace white people. Rousseau later testified that he heard the chant but thought attendees might have been saying “you will not replace us.”
The 2017 rally fueled criticism of President Donald Trump, who did not immediately comment on it and then placed blame on “both sides” while condemning the display of “hatred, bigotry and violence.” It also animated the presidential run of Joe Biden and spurred a successful lawsuit against the rally’s organizers by an advocacy group called Integrity First for America, whose leader, Amy Spitalnick, is now CEO of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs.
“Patriot Front is an offshoot of one of the white supremacist groups we (successfully) sued for orchestrating the Charlottesville violence,” Spitalnick said in a JCPA statement on Sunday. “They are emboldened because their extremism has been wholly normalized by the administration and others.”
Trump has not commented publicly on this weekend’s Patriot Front march, which took place during festivities to celebrate the United States’ 250th birthday. A top administration official did not directly answer when CNN’s Dana Bash asked him whether he would urge Trump to denounce the group.
“What they stand for is nothing that I could possibly agree with,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum told Bash, who is Jewish and has made antisemitism a focus of her recent coverage. “But one of the foundational principles of the United States, which makes democracy messy, is free speech.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hundreds of Patriot Front members march in Washington on July 4, alarming Jewish groups appeared first on The Forward.
