VILNIUS, November 05, BNS–Lithuanian culture minister Šarūnas Birutis is on a visit to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem where he is scheduled to meet representatives of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, cultural organizations and immigrants from Lithuania.

The minister will also visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum.

The Lithuanian Culture Ministry of Culture said in a statement Thursday Lithuania and Israel share important concerns such as the preservation of common history and culture, protection of the Jewish cultural heritage in Lithuania and maintaining contact with Lithuanian immigrants in Israel and their descendants.

BNS

Ona Kolobovaitė photo © 2015 by M. Aleksa

The Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theater has gone on tour in Israel and will perform Mozart’s opera “Marriage of Figaro” at the Israeli Opera Theater in Tel Aviv from November 4 to 15.

Eleven performances are planned. Two teams of singers are scheduled to be used and the opera’s choir, orchestra, costumes and decorations have also been sent from Vilnius to Tel Aviv. This is one of the biggest tours in recent times for the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theater.

Conductor Martynas Staškus will conduct the opera with director’s assistant Jūratė Sodytė helping adapt the work for the stage.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky delivered the following short address at a concert held in Munich Monday:

Dear honored guests,

It is my pleasure to be here and on behalf of the Lithuanian Jewish community to express my utmost respect and gratitude to our honored partner, the Order of Malta, and to all of you for paying the tribute to the Lithuanian Righteous of Nations, some of the all-time greatest ambassadors of humanity.

Over 90 percent of the once-flourishing, vibrant and influential Lithuanian Jewish or Litvak Community was destroyed during the Holocaust by the Nazis and their local collaborators. This means that out of approximately 210,000 Lithuanian Jews, an estimated 195,000 fell as victims of the Holocaust, and not without the help of local citizens, despite having more than 600 years of shared history.

A significant number of courageous and kind-hearted Lithuanian people, however, found inner strength when it was needed most to take a stand against evil at all costs, despite having very limited resources and facing an immense threat to the lives of their families and their own.

Their heroic act of saving their innocent Jewish neighbors during the grimmest of times, often involving much self sacrifice, demonstrated great human compassion; the hearts of the Jewish rescuers became shelters of hope for the hopeless, their eyes saw light in time of darkness. The life-saving decisions they made and the actions they took set the true example of morality for every of us to follow to this day.

The Lithuanian Jewish community is alive today thanks to the compassion and courage of the Righteous among Nations. I thank you all for remembering them together today and for recognizing their noble cause as well as their colossal contribution to our history.

Three people were wounded Monday afternoon in a stabbing attack by a Palestinian in the central city of Rishon Lezion, a southern suburb of Tel Aviv.

Two people—a man in his 40s and a woman in her 80s—were in serious condition, the Magen David Adom rescue service said. The third victim, 26, was lightly hurt.

The attacker, identified by authorities as a 19-year-old Palestinian man from Hebron, stabbed the 40-year-old man from behind on a bus on Tarmab Street, got off the bus and ran to the adjacent Herzl Street, where he stabbed the elderly woman and the young man.

Full story here.

Turkish president Erdogan’s resounding election victory came as bad news for Israel, which has suffered the brunt of his insults and schemes.

Erdogan’s ruling Islamist AK Party now has a free hand to continue their crackdown against local media which criticize the Government, and against others deemed enemies of the state.

Erdogan, a Sunni Muslim who supports the Muslim Brotherhood–including Hamas–in the region, could become even more aggressive in pursuing his regional ambitions.

Read full story here.

British actress Helen Mirren spoke out against the cultural boycott of Israel on Wednesday as she was honored at the 29th Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles, California.

Talking to the press before the ceremony, the Academy Award winner described the campaign to boycott Israeli through cutting off cultural ties as “a really bad idea.”

“The people who are the most inspiring in Israel tend to be from the cultural community. The writers, the directors, the poets, the musicians, they are truly extraordinary people doing amazing work, peace giving work, working towards peace all the time,” she said. “To cut them off is the craziest idea, I don’t agree with it at all.”

Vatican City, October 28, (BNS-AP-AFP)–On Wednesday the Catholic Church marked the 50th anniversary of the historical Nostra Aetate [“In Our Time”] declaration which called for interfaith dialogue with a host of non-Christian religions and led to an historical change in Catholic-Jewish relations.

St. Peter’s Square Wednesday hosted an audience with the pope to remember this groundbreaking move made on October 28, 1965, when Paul VI was pope and the Church condemned anti-Semitism.

During his usual general audience, pope Francis spoke about the importance of Nostra Aetate and said it had transformed Catholic-Jewish relations from “doubt and opposition to cooperation and goodwill. … From enemies and strangers we have become friends and brothers.”

Retired lieutenant colonel Jonathan D. Halevi, senior researcher on the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, has published an article on the current wave of violence in Israel called “The Hidden Hand behind the Palestinian Terror Wave” on the JCPA’s Institute for Contemporary Affairs website.

The Hidden Hand behind the Palestinian Terror Wave
Institute for Contemporary Affairs
Founded jointly with the Wechsler Family Foundation
Vol. 15, No. 33
October 25, 2015

• Gaza has in effect become an independent Palestinian state, and this Hamas-ruled state is making a pitch, by means of the “Al-Quds Intifada,” to annex the West Bank as well. For Hamas, this is only one phase in the phased plan to implement an ethnic cleansing of the Jews from the Land of Israel.

Gerald M. Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar Ilan University and president of NGO Monitor, a group which reports on anti-Israeli NGOs and the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement world-wide, has published an editorial in the Times of Israel on EU plans to require special labels on “colonial goods” produced in the occupied territories for import to the EU under the EU-Israel Association Agreement signed in 1995 granting preferential customs rates.

The op/ed came in response to an interview with EU ambassador to Israel Lars Faaborg-Andersen in the same newspaper in early October in which he said he failed to understand why Jerusalem was making such a “big fuss” about the EU’s plan to label Israeli products from the West Bank.

Steinberg said: “If nothing else, European officials at least get credit for consistency. For decades, in war and peace, terror and calm, they have not flagged in the belief that they can engineer their vision of peace for Israel. Having failed in so many previous attempts, the European move is another step in the effort to impose its preferred policies, via the labeling of products from the post-1967 ‘occupied territories’ in order to create economic pressure on Israel.”