Modiin Illit - Seen from afar, this fast-growing settlement embodies everything that the Obama administration wants to address through its demand for a freeze on settlement building: it sits on land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and, with 45,000 residents and 60 births a week, it is the largest and fastest-growing Jewish community in the West Bank. If, as is widely believed...

Jerusalem - Rabbi David Yosef, the son of Shas party spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef, resisted a bribe offered by state's witness Solomon Dwek in the American investigation that resulted in the arrest of 44 people on charges of bribery or money laundering last week, according to a report by News One on Sunday. The report says that Dwek came to the younger Rabbi Yosef and offered to cash a $25,000...

Munich, Germany - The words of former Nazi guard Ignat Danilchenko will haunt John Demjanjuk one last time. Danilchenko's decades-old statements to Soviet investigators provide what are considered the most detailed -- and controversial -- allegations of Demjanjuk's work as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. German prosecutors this month listed Danilchenko as a...

Jerusalem - Anti-Semitism was behind the highly publicized arrests last week of rabbis, including three from the Aleppo-Syrian Jewish community in New York and New Jersey, according to Yitzhak Kakun, editor-in-chief of the Shas weekly Yom Le'Yom. "There is a feeling here that the FBI purposely attempted to arrest as many rabbis as possible at once in an attempt to humiliate them," Kakun said...

Washington - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Iran will never achieve its goal of obtaining a nuclear weapon, declaring to Tehran: "Your pursuit is futile." "What we want to do is to send a message to whoever is making these decisions, that if you're pursuing nuclear weapons for the purpose of intimidating, of projecting your power, we're not...

New York - If the news turns out to be true, how could such a thing happen? The news hit fast and hard: rabbis and politicians in New Jersey allegedly involved in a huge money-laundering scam. As if Madoff wasn't enough of an embarrassment for the Jewish community, now this. Such activities are completely forbidden by Torah law and must be condemned in the strongest unequivocal terms. But...

England - A Schoolboy aged just 11 beat-up a Jewish man because of his religion. The school-aged attacker launched himself at the victim – in his late 20s – landing a punch on him outside the synagogue, on Bewick Road, Gateshead. After spearheading the onslaught, the 11-year-old stepped to the side as a gang of older attackers “piled-on” the isolated man, leaving him...

Jerusalem - Israeli Government sources believe that one of the aftereffects of the massive money-laundering and illegal organ trading case that broke this week will be a sharp decline in donations to Israeli yeshivas, particularly those linked with the ultra-Orthodox party Shas and its spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Sources say that the wave of donations received by Israel's Sephardic...

Chicago, IL - Rabbi Pinchas Lipschutz, editor and publisher of the US Yated Ne’eman has invited me to see first hand the Chareidi community in Me’ah She’arim, and I have accepted that invitation, hopefully in the form of a mission to Israel of unity, achdut, within the Orthodox community. I am first quoting the invitation, which was printed as an Editorial in this past weeks Yated, [read...

New York City - City-run hospitals faked records and covered up dozens of botched operations, deadly accidents, malpractice and other medical screwups, a Daily News investigation has found. The coverups hid a trail of human suffering among patients who were maimed and relatives who were never told the truth about how their loved ones died or were injured unnecessarily. A months-long probe...

Israel - In his weekly sermon Saturday evening, Shas' spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef slammed US President Barack Obama and other western leaders for pressuring Israel to freeze construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. "'You can't build here, you can't build there' – it's as if we were their slaves," the rabbi protested. "We are being ruled by slaves," he said," adding that, "Our...

Williamsburg, NY - The building boom may have come to a screeching halt in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. But those neighborhoods have been anything but quiet in recent months. About 4,300 complaints about noise in Community Board 1 came into the city's 311 line during the first six months of the year. Most of those people were irritated about noise coming from their neighbor's homes. The...

Jerusalem - The Jerusalem Magistrate's Court placed a gag order Sunday on the case against a woman suspected of nearly starving her child to death, preventing the latest court developments from reaching the public. The court's president, Judge Shlomit Dotan, had been expected to decide where the boy would be transferred after he was nursed back to health at Jerusalem's Hadassah Ein Kerem...

Deal, NJ - Yosef's son, Rabbi David Yosef, visited the community a number of times a year as the guest of Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Haim, who is currently one of the main suspects in a money laundering case involving ultra-Orthodox communities in New Jersey and New York. David Yosef's family members say he departed from the US just hours before the FBI swept into the community to arrest 44 of its...

New York - Brad Simon, a former federal prosecutor and assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said he is surprised the government's case appears to rely so heavily on the testimony of one key witness with a checkered past who Sources have identified as Solomon Dwek. "This guy, at least from a defense attorney's point of view, seems like a treasure trove for defense...