UNMIA

by David Wilder
October 26, 2008
The Jewish Community of Hebron
P.O. Box 105, Kiryat Arba 90100 Israel
Tel: 972-2-9965333; Fax: 972-2-9965304

Last night at just after one o’clock my cell phone rang. When the phone rings at 1:00 in the morning, at least in my house, something is wrong. Orit Struck was on the other end, apologizing for waking me up and then informing me that hundreds, if not more troops, - police, soldiers, the riot squad, etc. were on their way to the Federman farm, located just off the road between Kiryat Arba proper and the Givat Harsina (Ramat Mamre) neighborhood, just about five minutes outside of Hebron. Their goal: to destroy the farm.

The homes on the Federman property have been there for over ten years. Noam and Elisheva have lived there for the past two years. Every once in a while the war drums start sounding, with rumors of an impending expulsion from the land, which the government says is ‘illegally settled.’ Most times, it’s just noise. Tonight it looked like the real thing.

I was out of the house within about ten minutes. But when I arrived at Ma’arat HaMachpela, on the only road to Kiryat …

UN Watch — New York, Sept. 24, 2008 — In the first major TV debate on the UN’s upcoming Durban II “anti-racism” conference, UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer exposed the cynical subversion of human rights and the anti-racism cause by the world’s most intolerant and repressive regimes. Debating Neuer from London is Islamic Human Rights Commission Chair Massoud Shadjareh, a pro-Hezbollah activist who led the anti-Zionist incitement at the orignal Durban conference in 2001.

Part of a Trend in Sub-Saharan Africa To Claim Jewish Ancestry
Forward - By Marc Perelman
Thu. Oct 02, 2008

WANDERING JEWS: With traditions that echo Jewish ritual, these Nigerians seek official recognition as Jews. ‘We want a rabbi to come here and elevate a Torah,’ said Harim Chevron Levy (second from right).

Lagos, Nigeria — Efraim Uba was born and raised Catholic in southeastern Nigeria, the homeland of the Ibo ethnic group. He spent 17 years as a Pentecostal preacher before joining a messianic congregation where members wore yarmulkes and tallits but praised Jesus. In 1999, one congregant traveled to Israel and came back claiming that the Ibos were Jews. He convinced the whole congregation to embrace Judaism.

“We believe we are from Israel, and we only recently discovered that so many old Ibo traditions were in fact Jewish ones,” said Uba, 60, who was wearing a large silver Jewish star around his neck. In 1999, he founded the Association of Jewish Faith in Nigeria, an organization with some 20 congregations, most of them in his native region.

He is one of an estimated 30,000 Nigerians — a fraction of the nation’s 135 million people — who claim to be …