Plundered Jewish Documents, Long Thought Lost, Surface in New York City

July 26 2021

Last week, federal agents took possession of a cache of documents about to be auctioned in New York City, which they had determined had been seized from Jews either during or after the Holocaust. Tim Fitzsimons reports:

The Justice Department on Thursday announced the seizure of seventeen funeral scrolls, manuscripts, and community records that were looted from East European Jewish communities annihilated in the Holocaust. . . . One item, prosecutors wrote, was a manuscript containing ancestry records for a Jewish community in the city now known as Cluj-Napoca in Romania, [known as Kolozsvár to Hungarians and Kloyzenberg to Jews].

Contemporaneous records established that the manuscript existed in Romania in 1936, “shortly before the Holocaust had begun.” . . . The recovered scrolls and manuscripts, investigators said, included “prayers for the dead, memorial pages and/or the names of deceased members of the Jewish communities, operating rules of the society, society-member payments, obligations, society regulations, the identity of society religious leaders, and, in some cases, the names of the society members who were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz.”

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Read more at NBC News

More about: East European Jewry, Holocaust, Jewish archives, Romania

Europe Must Stop Tolerating Iranian Operations on Its Soil

March 31 2023

Established in 2012 and maintaining branches in Europe, North America, and Iran, the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Network claims its goal is merely to show “solidarity” for imprisoned Palestinians. The organization’s leader, however, has admitted to being a representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a notorious terrorist group whose most recent accomplishments include murdering a seventeen-year-old girl. As Arsen Ostrovsky and Patricia Teitelbaum point out, Samidoun is just one example of how the European Union allows Iran-backed terrorists to operate in its midst:

The PFLP is a proxy of the Iranian regime, which provides the terror group with money, training, and weapons. Samidoun . . . has a branch in Tehran. It has even held events there, under the pretext of “cultural activity,” to elicit support for operations in Europe. Its leader, Khaled Barakat, is a regular on Iran’s state [channel] PressTV, calling for violence and lauding Iran’s involvement in the region. It is utterly incomprehensible, therefore, that the EU has not yet designated Samidoun a terror group.

According to the Council of the European Union, groups and/or individuals can be added to the EU terror list on the basis of “proposals submitted by member states based on a decision by a competent authority of a member state or a third country.” In this regard, there is already a standing designation by Israel of Samidoun as a terror group and a decision of a German court finding Barakat to be a senior PFLP operative.

Given the irrefutable axis-of-terror between Samidoun, PFLP, and the Iranian regime, the EU has a duty to put Samidoun and senior Samidoun leaders on the EU terror list. It should do this not as some favor to Israel, but because otherwise it continues to turn a blind eye to a group that presents a clear and present security threat to the European Union and EU citizens.

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Read more at Newsweek

More about: European Union, Iran, Palestinian terror, PFLP