RUTHIE BLUM on The latest Yad Vashem fiasco and US, Israeli scientists document the oldest star ever seen, 13 billion light-years away and Vera Gissing, Who Was Rescued by ‘Britain’s Schindler,’ Dies at 93 and US Seizes Yacht Owned By Oligarch With Close Ties To Putin and Overnight Jerusalem-Ben Gurion Airport-Tel Aviv train service to launch this month
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
The Three are Rabbi Yehuda Glick, famous temple mount activist, and former Israel Mk, and then Robert Weinger, the world's greatest shofar blower and seller of Shofars, and myself after we had gone to the 12 gates of the Temple Mount in 2020 to blow the shofar to ask G-d to heal the world from the Pandemic. It was a highlight to my experience in living in Israel and I put it on my blog each day to remember.
The articles that I include each day are those that I find interesting, so I feel you will find them interesting as well. I don't always agree with all the points of each article but found them interesting or important to share with you, my readers, and friends. It is cathartic for me to share my thoughts and frustrations with you about life in general and in Israel. As a Rabbi, I try to teach and share the Torah of the G-d of Israel as a modern Orthodox Rabbi. I never intend to offend anyone but sometimes people are offended and I apologize in advance for any mistakes. The most important psychological principle I have learned is that once someone's mind is made up, they don't want to be bothered with the facts, so, like Rabbi Akiva, I drip water (Torah is compared to water) on their made-up minds and hope that some of what I have share sinks in. Love Rabbi Yehuda Lave.
US Seizes Yacht Owned By Oligarch With Close Ties To Putin
A Civil Guard stands by the yacht called Tango in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, Monday April 4, 2022. U.S. federal agents and Spain's Civil Guard are searching the yacht owned by a Russian oligarch. The yacht is among the assets linked to Viktor Vekselberg, a billionaire and close ally with Russia's President Vladimir Putin, who heads the Moscow-based Renova Group, a conglomerate encompassing metals, mining, tech and other assets, according to U.S. Treasury Department documents. All of Vekselberg's assets in the U.S. are frozen and U.S. companies are forbidden from doing business with him and his entities. (AP Photo/Francisco Ubilla)
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(AP) — The U.S. government seized a mega yacht in Spain owned by an oligarch with close ties to the Russian president on Monday, the first in the government's sanctions enforcement initiative to "seize and freeze" giant boats and other pricey assets of Russian elites.
Spain's Civil Guard and U.S. federal agents descended on the yacht at the Marina Real in the port of Palma de Mallorca, the capital of Spain's Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. Associated Press reporters at the scene saw police going in and out of the boat on Monday morning.
The seizure was confirmed by two people familiar with the matter. The people could not discuss the matter publicly and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity. A Spanish Civil Guard spokesman confirmed that officers from the Spanish police body and from the FBI were at the marina searching the vessel Monday morning and said further details would be released later.
A Civil Guard source told The Associated Press that the immobilized yacht is Tango, a 78-meter (254-feet) vessel that carries Cook Islands flag and that Superyachtfan.com, a specialized website that tracks the world's largest and most exclusive recreational boats, values at $120 million. The source was also not authorized to be named in media reports and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.
The yacht is among the assets linked to Viktor Vekselberg, a billionaire and close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who heads the Moscow-based Renova Group, a conglomerate encompassing metals, mining, tech and other assets, according to U.S. Treasury Department documents. All of Vekselberg's assets in the U.S. are frozen and U.S. companies are forbidden from doing business with him and his entities.
The move is the first time the U.S. government has seized an oligarch's yacht since Attorney General Merrick Garland and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen assembled a task force known as REPO — short for Russian Elites, Proxies and Oligarchs — as an effort to enforce sanctions after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.
Vekselberg has long had ties to the U.S. including a green card he once held and homes in New York and Connecticut. The Ukrainian-born businessman built his fortune by investing in the aluminum and oil industries in the post-Soviet era.
Vekselberg was also questioned in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and has worked closely with his American cousin, Andrew Intrater, who heads the New York investment management firm Columbus Nova.
Vekselberg and Intrater were thrust into the spotlight in the Mueller probe after the attorney for adult film star Stormy Daniels released a memo that claimed $500,000 in hush money was routed through Columbus Nova to a shell company set up by Donald Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Columbus Nova denied that Vekselberg played any role in its payments to Cohen.
Vekselberg and Intrater met with Cohen at Trump Tower, one of several meetings between members of Trump's inner circle and high-level Russians during the 2016 campaign and transition.
The 64-year-old mogul founded Renova Group more than three decades ago. The group holds the largest stake in United Co. Rusal, Russia's biggest aluminum producer, among other investments.
Vekselberg was first sanctioned by the U.S. in 2018, and again in March of this year, shortly after the invasion of Ukraine began. Vekselberg has also been sanctioned by authorities in the United Kingdom.
The U.S. Justice Department has also launched a sanctions enforcement task force known as KleptoCapture, which also aims to enforce financial restrictions in the U.S. imposed on Russia and its billionaires, working with the FBI, Treasury and other federal agencies. That task force will also target financial institutions and entities that have helped oligarchs move money to dodge sanctions.
The White House has said that many allied countries, including German, the U.K, France, Italy and others are involved in trying to collect and share information against Russians targeted for sanctions. In his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden warned oligarch that the U.S. and European allies would "find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets."
"We are coming for your ill-begotten gains," he said.
Monday's capture is not the first time Spanish authorities have been involved in the seizure of a Russian oligarch's superyacht. Officials there said they had seized a vessel valued at over $140 million owned by the CEO of a state-owned defense conglomerate and a close Putin ally.
French authorities have also seized superyachts, including one believed to belong to Igor Sechin, a Putin ally who runs Russian oil giant Rosneft, which has been on the U.S. sanctions list since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
Italy has also seized several yachts and other assets.
Italian financial police moved quickly seizing the superyacht "Lena" belonging to Gennady Timchenko, an oligarch close to Putin, in the port of San Remo; the 65-meter (215-foot) "Lady M" owned by Alexei Mordashov in nearby Imperia, featuring six suites and estimated to be worth 65 million euros; as well as villas in Tuscany and Como, according to government officials.
A highly magnified image of the star Earendel. The collection of yellow-looking galaxies form the massive galaxy-cluster lens that magnifies background objects lying behind it. The inset shows the highly magnified red galaxy, host to Earendel, stretched into an arc due to lensing, and the highly magnified star is marked with a white arrow. (NASA, ESA, Brian Welch, Dan Coe)
American and Israeli scientists have captured and documented images from the Hubble space telescope showing the most distant star ever seen, in a finding they say "opens a door to learn about stars in the early universe."
The light they saw from the star — newly named Earendel — had traveled 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing as it did when the universe was just 7 percent of its current age. Given that the previous record was 9 billion years, they say it is a major leap.
Prof. Adi Zitrin of Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba was part of the US-led study, newly peer-reviewed and published in Nature.
He told The Times of Israel that he was "excited and amazed" by the finding, and said it succeeded because the stars were, quite literally, aligned.
Detection systems on Earth aren't generally powerful enough to see such light, but a large galaxy cluster called WHL0138-08 has such a large gravitational pull that light bends around it, and ends up being magnified by a factor of thousands.
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Zitrin is one of the top experts on this kind of magnification, and is part of an international research group that hunts for galaxies and stars that are visible as a result of it. So when the lead author, Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University, thought he had seen an ancient star, Zitrin's skills were called in to verify it.
The Hubble telescope as seen from the shuttle Discovery, February 1997. (NASA/Public Domain)
"I built a model that mimics the way that the galaxy cluster between Earendel and Earth acted as a 'gravitational magnifying lens,'" Zitrin said. "This model, subsequently tweaked by Brian, was used to assess whether the light we were seeing looked as light from a very old star would appear."
When Welch emailed to say his model indicated that it was, indeed, 12.9 billion-year-old light from a star, "I was very excited," he said.
Prof. Adi Zitrin (Courtesy Ben-Gurion University)
Zitrin explained: "This model was important to eliminate the possibility we were seeing objects along the way, a cluster of stars but not a single star — which would have still been an important finding but less exciting. My model was one of a handful used to verify the finding."
He added: "The international team I'm part of, which images galaxy clusters that act as 'gravitational magnifying lenses,' initially expected to find just galaxies, not individual stars. But happily, we found one in 2018, and this one now.
"Newly discovering this star opens a door to learn about stars in the early universe, as we have hardly any information on stars from so long ago. This finding has given a whole new insight, which will lead to far more research."
The Jerusalem-based World Holocaust Remembrance Center, which professes not to "fall prey to any political agenda," is defending its recent hire of a post-Zionist "conscientious objector" who compared the IDF to the Nazi Wehrmacht
When Effi Eitam was tapped in 2020 by then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the new chairman of Yad Vashem—to replace Avner Shalev, who had held the position for nearly three decades—all hell broke loose on the left. The religious-Zionist retired brigadier general and former Knesset member and Cabinet minister was falsely accused by most of the media and academia, both in Israel and among Jews across the ocean, of being a right-wing fanatical racist.
The controversy was filled with the customary falsehoods, though mud-slinging would be a more apt depiction of the vilification of one of Israel's best and brightest. The politicians, Jewish organizations and Holocaust survivors who opposed the appointment pointed to Eitam's comments on Palestinians and Arab Israelis, on the grounds that such criticism is not fitting for an institution commemorating the mass slaughter of innocents.
What they really meant is that Eitam would never go along with the effort to universalize the Shoah.
The carry-on was so intense that he didn't stand a chance. In his stead, Dani Dayan was selected and approved for the job. Dayan, a member of the Yad Vashem Council, had just returned to Israel after completing a four-year stint as the country's consul general in New York.
During his tenure in the Big Apple, he managed to shake his own "dubious right-wing" reputation—as a previous chairman of the "far-right-wing" umbrella organization of settlements, the Yesha Council—and become palatable to liberal circles at home and abroad.
Unfortunately, since taking the reins, he has demonstrated the ability to accomplish this by toeing a politically correct line.
Shortly after his instatement, he was confronted by individuals and groups demanding that he return a photo to the wall of one of the exhibits that had been removed when the Jerusalem-based World Holocaust Remembrance Center was expanded in 2005. The famous picture in question, from 1941, shows Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini having a chummy conversation with Adolf Hitler about joint efforts to exterminate the Jews—the latter in Europe and the former in Palestine.
In a Dec. 2 statement, Dayan explained why he refused to concede.
"To be clear: The Mufti's part in the history of the Holocaust is presented at Yad Vashem in the correct proportion and context, especially in comparison to other figures," he wrote. "Research shows that the meeting between the Mufti and Adolf Hitler had a negligible practical effect on Nazi policy."
He went on to state that "[a]ttempting to pressure Yad Vashem to expand the exhibit on the Mufti in the Holocaust History Museum is tantamount to forcing Yad Vashem to partake in a debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is alien to its mission. … Yad Vashem will continue to defend the historical truth of this dark chapter of our not-too-distant past, without falling prey to any political agenda."
That such nonsense was supposed to pass as a legitimate excuse is bad enough. But it's particularly pathetic in light of Yad Vashem's latest hire: Dan Tzahor. The fact that the only news outlet covering the outrage is the country's sole conservative TV station, Channel 14, makes it even worse.
Tzahor, who was taken on board to manage Yad Vashem's libraries, is a radical, left-wing activist and "conscientious objector," though his conscience where Israel is concerned is non-existent. The self-described post-Zionist is an Israel Defense Forces reserve-duty refusenik who decries the Jewish state as colonialist enterprise.
As Channel 14 reported, a 2006 piece in Ma'ariv cited an Israeli Foreign Ministry representative as claiming that in talks Tzahor gave in the United States—with the title "Refusing to serve: Conscientious objection in Israel, Palestine and Iraq"—he compared the IDF to Nazis. Gilad Millo, at the time Israel's consul in Los Angeles for media and public affairs, told the newspaper that Tzahor's lecture tour was initiated by a Muslim student organization that engaged in anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activities.
Millo also recounted that Tzahor told a group of 50 students, most of whom were draped in Palestinian flags, that the IDF's door-to-door combat "was reminiscent of the Wehrmacht;" that the separation fence "ghettoized" Palestinians; and that "the occupation turned IDF soldiers into animals."
Following publication of the above article, Tzahor gave an interview to the left-wing daily Haaretz and argued that while he had not compared the IDF to the Nazi army, the Holocaust was central to his decision to refuse to do his reserve duty in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria).
Asked about terrorism, he replied that just as the Arabs need to "stop suicide bombings," Israelis have to "stop bombing and killing innocent civilians [in Gaza], and sleep soundly afterwards with no problem."
Learning that this paragon of anti-Israel political activism was being brought on by Yad Vashem to manage its libraries, the Zionist NGO Im Tirtzu promptly demanded that Dayan reverse the decision.
"Dr. Dan Tzahor met all the requirements of the position," responded Yad Vashem, insisting that the candidate was judged by his skills, not his political views, "as is appropriate and obligatory under the law."
Go tell that to Eitam and the rest of his supporters who championed him as the perfect choice to head the institution and prevent it from disappearing down the woke rabbit hole. Pressed by Im Tirtzu on the issue of Tzahor's refusal to perform reserve duty and admission that he's not a Zionist, Yad Vashem answered tersely that it's "not our place to address that."
Whether Dayan is a sell-out or a coward isn't clear. But he and the entire board of Yad Vashem ought to be deeply ashamed of themselves for tarnishing Holocaust remembrance and casting aspersions on the necessary use of Jewish power against enemies bent on Israel's destruction.
Ruthie Blum is an Israel-based journalist and author of "To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the 'Arab Spring.' "
Overnight Jerusalem-Ben Gurion Airport-Tel Aviv train service to launch this month
Starting Sept. 17, trains will run once an hour in each direction Saturday through Wednesday nights, but not on Thursday — typically the main evening for nightlife in Israel
The fast train between Jerusalem, Ben Gurion Airport, and Tel Aviv will begin offering overnight service in the coming weeks, the Transportation Ministry announced Sunday.
Starting September 17, trains headed in each direction will run once an hour between Saturday and Wednesday nights.
The ministry said the service will not be offered Thursday — typically the main evening for nightlife in Israel — because of a need for maintenance at the Jerusalem end of the line, though the train will run all night between Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Airport, where it stops regularly.
The move could be seen as part of Transportation Minister Merav Michaeli's effort to present public transportation as a solution to the country's congestion crisis. Including her agenda to run trains on Saturday and break the Shabbat
The ministry under Michaeli has invested around 80 percent of its budget in public transportation and sustainable transportation projects, and 20% in private vehicle infrastructure.
Vera Gissing, Who Was Rescued by 'Britain's Schindler,' Dies at 93
She was not quite 11 when train convoys were organized by a London stockbroker who carried her and hundreds of other Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II
Vera Gissing in an undated photo. She and her sister were able to flee what was then Czechoslovakia in 1939 thanks to Nicholas Winton, a young London stockbroker.Credit...via Gissing family
On July 1, 1939, about three months after Nazi troops goose-stepped into Prague and three days before Vera Diamantova's 11th birthday, she was bundled onto a train bound for Britain with hundreds of other Jewish children. All but three of the 16 relatives she left behind would perish in the Holocaust.
Vera survived. As Vera Gissing, she became a translator in England and raised a family there. She would often recount the moral courage of the parents who sent her and her older sister to safety, the English couple who offered her sanctuary, and Nicholas Winton, the young London stockbroker who, she learned only belatedly, had anonymously organized convoys, known as Kindertransport, to evacuate vulnerable children, most of them Jewish, by train from what was then Czechoslovakia before Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.
Vera Gissing died on March 12 in a nursing home in Wargrave, a village in Southeast England, her daughter Nicola Gissing said. She was 93.
For decades, Mr. Winton didn't reveal his part in organizing the rescue mission. Only in the 1980s, when he was in his 70s and his wife discovered his dusty scrapbook in their attic, did he begin speaking publicly about the experience. And in 1988, when he was nearly 80 and appearing on the BBC television program "That's Life," he was introduced to Mrs. Gissing and some of the other children whose lives he had saved.
Mr. Winton, who was Jewish and a socialist, abandoned a ski trip to Switzerland late in 1938 to join friends and refugee organizations in Prague in arranging eight train loads that evacuated 669 children.
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Vera Gissing (then Vera Diamantova) in 1934. Only about 100 of the 15,000 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia interned in concentration camps survived World War II.Credit...via Gissing family
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Nicholas Winton, who became known as "Britain's Schindler," with one of the hundreds of Jewish children whose lives he saved during the war.Credit...Press Association, via Associated Press
A ninth train, with a manifest of 250 children, including two of Mrs. Gissing's cousins, was canceled when the war began. All but two of the passengers scheduled to take that train would die in concentration camps during the war.
Only about 100 of the 15,000 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia interned in the camps survived the war.
"There would have been no possibility of me surviving had I stayed behind, if my parents did not have the moral courage to let us go," Mrs. Gissing said in an interview in 2006 with a Holocaust survivors' archive at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
"The scene at Prague station will be with me forever," The Daily Telegraph quoted her as recalling. "The forced cheerfulness of my parents — their last words of love, encouragement and advice. Until that moment, I felt more excited than afraid, but when the whistle blew and the train pulled slowly out of the station, my beloved mother and father could no longer mask their anguish."
She and her 15-year-old sister, Eva, wore dresses that fit exactly, in the hope that they would return soon enough not to need larger sizes to grow into. Mrs. Gissing said she was given a leather-bound diary in which to deliver messages to her parents indirectly during the interim.
"Every day I wrote my parents a letter," she said.
She had filled the pages of more than a dozen diaries by the end of the war, when she learned that her father had been fatally shot while on a death march from the Terezin concentration camp in December 1944 and her mother had died from typhoid two days after she was liberated from another camp, Bergen-Belsen.
Mrs. Gissing wrote an autobiography, "Pearls of Childhood" (1988), and collaborated with Muriel Emanuel on "Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation" (2001). Her story was recounted in a children's book by Peter Sís, "Nicky & Vera" (2021), fictionalized in the movie "All My Loved Ones" (1999) and told in the documentaries "Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport" (2000), which won an Academy Award, and "The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton" (2002), which won an International Emmy.
Veruska Anna Diamantova was born in Prague on July 4, 1928, to Karel Diamant, a wine merchant, and Irma (Kestner) Diamantova, who worked in her husband's office. She grew up in Celakovice, about 20 miles east of Prague.
"My sister was very serious and studious," she said in the interview for the University of Michigan archive. "I was a ragamuffin who always got into scrapes."
She recalled that it was snowing gently when the Germans occupied her town in March 1939. An officer commandeered the family's house. Residents were lining the streets silently, she said, and then, "as if with one voice, they started singing our national anthem that started with the words 'Where is my home?' I didn't realize that our home was no longer ours, and I didn't realize that this was the end of our happiness and the beginning of the occupation."
Vera's mother queued up for four days to apply for the Kindertransport; then, one evening, she announced to her husband at dinner that the girls had secured seats and would be going to England.
"There was a deathly silence. Father looked shocked and terribly surprised," Mrs. Gissing wrote in her memoir. "All at once his dear face seemed haggard and old. He covered it with his hands, whilst we all waited in silence. Then he lifted his head, smiled at us with tears in his eyes, sighed and said, 'All right, let them go.'"
Eva was sent to study at Dorset; she would become a nurse, marry a doctor and move to New Zealand in 1949.
Vera was placed with a Methodist foster family, the Rainfords, near Liverpool, but moved farther north with the Rainfords' daughter when German bombing began. She enrolled in a school for Czech refugee children in Shropshire, on the Welsh border, after she audaciously asked Edward Benes, the self-exiled former president of Czechoslovakia, to intervene on her behalf.
After the war, she studied English in Prague and worked as a translator for the defense ministry. But she fled the country again when the Communists seized control in 1948, returning to England. There she became a literary translator and married Michael Gissing, who ran a leather goods business. He died in 1995.
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Mrs. Gissing in 2011. She often spoke of the moral courage it took her parents to send them away, as well as that of Mr. Winton and the Rainfords, the Methodist couple in Britain who took her in.Credit...Via Gissing family
In addition to their daughter Nicola, an artist, she is survived by a son, Clive, an architect and business executive; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Sally, a fashion designer, died before her, as did her sister, Eva.
Mr. Winton, who was often likened to Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist credited with saving 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories — he became known as "Britain's Schindler" — died in 2015 at 106.
While Mrs. Gissing credited her parents and Mr. Winton with moral courage during the war, she also never forgot the Rainfords, the couple who took her in, even though they knew caring for another child would mean making sacrifices.
Their daughter, Dorothy, choosing from among photographs of six possibilities for a younger foster sister, chose Vera — for her smile.
"When, years later, I asked Daddy Rainford — the man of the family — why did he do it? Why did he choose me?" Mrs. Gissing remembered in 2006, "he said, 'I knew I couldn't save the world, I knew I couldn't stop war from coming, but I knew I could save one human life. And as Hitler broke — as Chamberlain broke his pledge to Czechoslovakia and Jews were in the direst danger, I decided it must be a Czech Jewish child.'"
As the last child left waiting in London for a guardian, Vera recalled, she was greeted by Mummy Rainford. "And as she saw me, she started laughing and smiling and crying at the same time and she ran toward me, flung her arms around me, and she spoke some words I didn't understand then, but they were 'You shall be loved.' And loved I was."
"And, you know," Mrs. Gissing added, "those are the most important words any child in danger, any child in need, can hear."
Correction: March 25, 2022
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated at one point the given name of Mrs. Gissing's sister. It was Eva, not Eve.
Correction: March 26, 2022
An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to "All My Loved Ones," a 1999 movie about Nicholas Winton and the children he rescued. It was a scripted film, not a documentary.
Sam Roberts, an obituaries reporter, was previously The Times's urban affairs correspondent and is the host of "The New York Times Close Up," a weekly news and interview program on CUNY-TV. @samrob12
