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South Africa’s chief rabbi exhorts his president to press Putin on Evan Gershkovich
(JTA) — South Africa’s president has taken heat for not cutting off ties with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine — but his country’s chief rabbi sees an opportunity in the relationship to lobby for an imprisoned Jew.
South African Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein wants his country’s president to advocate for Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in Russia in March, in a meeting this weekend with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Mr President – you are in a unique position to intercede on his behalf,” Goldstein wrote in a letter to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday. “Please speak directly to President Putin and urge him to release Gershkovich, whose ongoing incarceration is a violation of human rights, international press freedom and the rule of law.”
Ramaphosa has not yet responded the letter, sent on the eve of a mission of African leaders that he is leading to promote peace between Russia and Ukraine. The delegation was in Kyiv on Friday and is due to meet with Putin on Saturday.
Unlike the United States and many European countries, which support Ukraine, Ramaphosa declared in a lengthy statement last month that “South Africa will not take sides in a contest between global powers.” The United States, however, has accused South Africa of arming Russia.
In his letter, Goldstein cited the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, which sought allies on both sides of the Cold War. He also referred to South Africa’s being part of BRICS, a consortium of nations that includes Russia and South Africa in addition to Brazil, India and China.
Goldstein appealed to the struggle against apartheid to advocate for the release of Geshkovich, who was arrested for espionage in late March and has since been held without trial. Gershkovich is the son of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union, and Jewish organizations and supporters around the world have advocated for him to be released. The United States government and Wall Street Journal say the accusations against him are spurious, and other countries have also condemned his arrest.
“We know from our own bitter history here in South Africa, how the apartheid regime cloaked tyranny and cruelty in the garments of sham legal processes, including detention without trial,” Goldstein wrote. “Mr President, you are in a position of particular influence given South Africa’s BRICS leadership and your government’s close relations with Russia. I appeal to you — in your personal capacity and through all available government diplomatic channels — to intervene to secure his release, so that he can return home safely to his family in the US.”
Ramaphosa does not appear to have commented publicly on Gershkovich’s detainment.
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Russia Rules Out Big Concessions on Ukraine as Leak Shows Witkoff Advised Moscow
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomes US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, Aug. 6, 2025. Photo: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via REUTERS
Russia will make no big concessions on a peace plan for Ukraine, a senior Russian diplomat said on Wednesday, after a leaked recording of a call involving US envoy Steve Witkoff showed he had advised Moscow on how to pitch to Donald Trump.
Witkoff is expected to travel to Moscow next week with other senior US officials for talks with Russian leaders about a possible plan to end the nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine, the deadliest in Europe since World War II.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday he was ready to advance the US-backed framework for ending the war and to discuss disputed points with the US president in talks that he said should include European allies.
Kyiv and its European allies are worried that details of the plan leaked last week show it bows to key Russian demands – barring Ukraine‘s NATO entry, enshrining Russian control of a fifth of Ukraine, and limiting the size of Ukraine‘s army.
Trump later said progress was being made and Moscow was making concessions even though the war – in which Russian forces have been advancing – was only going to move “in one direction.”
But, while welcoming the Trump administration’s efforts, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday: “There can be no question of any concessions, or any surrender of our approaches to those key points.”
TRANSCRIPT OF WITKOFF-USHAKOV CALL LEAKED
Moscow also raised concerns about the leak to Bloomberg News of the transcript of a call between Witkoff and Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov in which the US envoy advised Ushakov on how to pitch a peace plan to Trump.
Trump, on Air Force One, brushed aside a question from a reporter about why Witkoff appeared to be coaching Russian officials as simply “what a dealmaker does” and “a very standard form of negotiation.”
But Russia said the leak was an unacceptable attempt to undermine peace efforts and amounted to hybrid warfare.
Ushakov said he had used WhatsApp to speak to Witkoff on several occasions and the Russian newspaper Kommersant, which interviewed Ushakov, ran a story headlined: “Who set up Steve Witkoff?”
Bloomberg said it had reviewed a recording of the call. It was not clear how Bloomberg got the recording of the conversation.
A Bloomberg News spokesperson said: “We stand by our story.”
TOO EARLY TO TALK OF PEACE, KREMLIN SAYS
Trump said on Tuesday Witkoff would meet Putin and that Jared Kushner, who helped negotiate the deal that brought about an uneasy ceasefire in the Gaza war between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, would also be involved.
“As for Witkoff, I can say that a preliminary agreement has been reached that he will come to Moscow next week,” Ushakov told reporters.
Asked by reporters whether a peace deal was close, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by Russian news agency Interfax as saying: “Wait, it’s premature to say that yet.”
Russian forces control more than 19% of Ukraine following Moscow‘s 2022 invasion, and have advanced in 2025 at the fastest pace since 2022, although the advances remain slow and Kyiv says Russia has incurred heavy losses to achieve them.
Ukraine and its European allies echo former US President Joe Biden in saying the invasion is an imperial-style land grab for which Moscow must not be rewarded.
Putin casts the war as a watershed moment in relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow‘s sphere of influence.
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Vast Trove of Medieval Jewish Records Opened Up by AI
A researcher of MiDRASH, a project dedicated to analyzing the National Library of Israel’s digital database of all known Hebrew manuscripts using Machine Learning, including manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza, holds up a 12th century fragment of a Yom Kippur liturgy in Jerusalem, Nov. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Researchers in Israel are hoping to make new discoveries about Jewish history by loading a digital database of manuscripts stretching back a thousand years into a new transcription tool that uses artificial intelligence.
The Cairo Geniza, the biggest collection of medieval Jewish documents in the world, has been the object of countless hours of study by scholars for more than a century but only a fraction of its over 400,000 documents have been thoroughly researched.
Although the entire collection has already been digitized and is available online in the form of images, most of its items have not been catalogued, many are disordered fragments from longer documents, and only around a tenth have transcriptions.
By training an AI model to read and transcribe the old texts, researchers will now be able to access and analyze the whole collection far more quickly, cross referencing names or words and assembling fragments into fuller documents.
“We are constantly trying to improve the abilities of the machine to decipher ancient scripts,” said Daniel Stokl Ben Ezra of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, one of the principal researchers in the MiDRASH transcription project.
The project has already made significant progress and could open up the documents – written in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Yiddish in a wide variety of handwritten scripts – to many different researchers, Stokl Ben Ezra added.
Transcriptions from more difficult manuscripts are reviewed by researchers for accuracy, helping to improve the AI training.
“The modern translation possibilities are incredibly advanced now and interlacing all this becomes much more feasible, much more accessible to the normal and not scientific reader,” he said.
Funded by the European Research Council, the project is based on the National Library of Israel’s digital database of the Cairo Geniza documents and brings together researchers from several universities and other institutes.
ANCIENT STOREROOM
One document transcribed by the project is a 16th century letter in Yiddish from Rachel, a widow from Jerusalem, to her son in Egypt with his reply written in the margins telling of his efforts to survive a plague sweeping through Cairo.
A Geniza is a synagogue’s repository for significant documents that are ultimately intended for ritual burial, and the one found in the Ben Ezra synagogue in historic Cairo had a dry atmosphere ideal for the preservation of old paper.
Cairo surpassed Damascus and Baghdad in the Middle Ages as the greatest city of the Middle East, a center of global trade, learning, and science and home to a thriving Jewish community, later expanded by refugees fleeing newly Christian Spain.
The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who was physician to the family of Saladin, the famous Muslim sultan who ousted the crusaders from Jerusalem, worshipped at the Ben Ezra synagogue while living in Cairo.
As dynasties and empires rose and fell, the community quietly went about its daily life, its religious authorities filling the Geniza with the rabbinical arguments, civic records and other detritus of administrative and intellectual business.
The Geniza’s astonishing haul of records and papers, including some written by Maimonides himself, was discovered by scholars in the late 19th century but, although it has been studied ever since, its enormous size means huge gaps remain.
“The possibility to reconstruct, to make a kind of Facebook of the Middle Ages, is just before our eyes,” Stokl Ben Ezra said.
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Pro-Hamas Group Palestine Action’s Appeal Over UK Ban Begins
Protesters from “Palestine Action” demonstrate on the roof of Guardtech Group in Brandon, Suffolk, Britain, July 1, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Chris Radburn
The British government’s ban on the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas campaign group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization amounted to an authoritarian restriction on protest, lawyers representing a co-founder seeking to overturn the ban argued on Wednesday.
Palestine Action was proscribed in July, putting it on a par with Islamic State or al Qaeda and making it a crime to be a member, which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison. Since then, more than 2,000 people have been arrested for holding signs in support of the group.
The group had increasingly targeted Israel-linked defense companies in Britain with “direct action,” often blocking entrances, or spraying red paint, particularly focusing on Israel’s largest defense firm Elbit Systems.
Britain’s Home Office [interior ministry] argues the group‘s escalating actions, culminating in a June break-in at the RAF Brize Norton air base when activists damaged two planes, amount to terrorism.
But lawyers representing Huda Ammori, who co-founded Palestine Action in 2020, say the move flies in the face of Britain’s long history of direct action protests and is “so extreme as to render the UK an international outlier.”
It was the first time a “direct action, civil disobedience organization that does not advocate for violence” had been proscribed as terrorist, Ammori’s lawyer Raza Husain told London’s High Court.
He compared the response to the group to that of other civil disobedience campaigns, such as Rosa Parks, the late US civil rights figure who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in 1955, and the suffragette movement which campaigned for women’s right to vote in the early 20th century.
GROUP‘S ACTIONS ESCALATED AMID WAR IN GAZA
Lawyers representing the Home Office said in court filings that the right to freedom of expression does not protect “speech and activity in support of a proscribed organization that commits serious property damage.”
Palestine Action has frequently targeted defense companies. It stepped up its actions during the Gaza war, with six members arrested on suspicion of plotting to disrupt the London Stock Exchange in January 2024.
Six people went on trial last week for aggravated burglary, criminal damage, and violent disorder over a raid on Elbit, with one charged with causing grievous bodily harm by hitting a police officer with a sledgehammer. They deny the charges.
Ammori’s lawyers say the ban has led to pro-Palestinian protesters being questioned by police at demonstrations without expressing support for Palestine Action.
The British government argues proscription only prevents support for Palestine Action and has not prevented people from protesting “in favor of the Palestinian people or against Israel’s actions in Gaza.”
The case is due to conclude next week, with a ruling at a later date.