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Pope emphasises his 'solidarity with Jews' after provoking outrage by readmitting bishop who denies Holocaust By DAILY MAIL REPORTER 29th January 2009 Pope Benedict has expressed his 'full and unquestionable solidarity' with Jews, after outraging many by rehabilitating a bishop who denies the Holocaust. Speaking at his Wednesday audience, the German-born pope tried to heal the rift with Jews by saying the attempt to exterminate them in the Holocaust should remain a warning to all humanity. Recalling his visit to the Auschwitz death camp in 2006, Benedict condemned the 'pitiless killing of millions of Jews, innocent victims of blind racial...

(ANSA) - Vatican City, January 28 - Pope Benedict XVI acted quickly on Wednesday to counter a threat from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel to indefinitely sever relations with the Vatican over his decision to lift the excommunication for a traditionalist bishop who continued to deny the existence of the Holocaust. The move was announced by the Chief Rabbinate director general, Oded Weiner, who also said that a March 2-4 meeting in Rome with the Catholic Church's Commission for Religious Relations with Jews had been cancelled. At the center of the dispute is British-born Bishop Richard Williamson, one of...

Pope Benedict XVI insisted on Wednesday that he felt "full and indisputable solidarity" with Jews. Benedict spoke days after his decision to revoke the excommunication of a bishop who says no Jews were gassed during the Holocaust provoked an outcry among Jews. Benedict said Wednesday that he hoped the memory of the Holocaust would also serve as a warning against the "unpredictable power of evil when it conquers the hearts of men." He spoke during a public audience at the Vatican. The Vatican had already distanced itself from comments by bishop Richard Williamson, who has denied that 6 million Jews...

NEW YORK, January 27, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) -  Rabbi Yehuda Levin, spokesman for Rabbinical Alliance of America, will be in Rome Thursday meeting with high ranking Vatican officials. While there he will express solidarity regarding the recent Vatican criticisms of US President Barack Obama and his executive order which has permitted US taxpayer funds to be given to organizations performing and lobbying for abortion internationally.  Levin will be representing over 800 Orthodox Jewish Rabbis who form the Rabbinical Alliance of America. His visit is being coordinated by the Rome office of Human Life International. Following Obama's overturning of the Mexico City...

Jews and the Catholic Church. The Rabbis of Italy Don't Like This Pope OMA, January 16, 2009 – In the area of geopolitics, the war in Gaza has sharpened the disagreements between the Catholic Church and Israel, as www.chiesa showed in its article on January 4. The hope is that Benedict XVI's trip to the Holy Land, thought to be scheduled for May, will diminish the mutual misunderstandings. Meanwhile, however, mainly because of Israeli intransigence, there is no progress in the negotiations to implement the 1993 accords between the Holy See and Israel. Nor is there any sign of the...

At past inaugurations, ceremonial prayers uttered on behalf of the incoming president drew about as much attention as the flags on the podium. Not this year. Barack Obama's choice of clergy is under scrutiny like no other president-elect before him, alternately outraging Americans on the left and the right as he navigates the minefield of U.S. religion. "I can't recall any prayers drawing so much attention," said Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center who specializes in religion in public life. Gay advocates assailed Obama, while many conservative Christians were heartened, when he invited the Rev. Rick Warren,...

When Rabbis for Obama was announced with great fanfare it was meant to reassure worried Jewish voters. The 300 Rabbis who signed on to the letter which stated that Barack Obama had "longstanding, stalwart support for Israel" and claimed that "Senator Obama is in the best position to restore faith in America as a leader in the fight against serious threats to Israel." But when you mix Obama and clergy together, the one thing you can count on is that they'll be left wing radicals who are anti-American and anti-Israel... and the Rabbis for Obama signers don't disappoint. In fact...

There’s no denying Barack Obama’s gifts, at least when it comes to a classic Democratic constituency teetering away from him — America’s Jews, who, as I noted yesterday, are showing signs of giving John McCain the largest share of their vote since Ronald Reagan in 1980. In a brilliant effort to shore up his support and stanch the bleeding, Obama held a conference call this morning with 900 rabbis to wish them a Happy New Year. The High Holy Days of the Jewish faith begin on the evening of the 29th of September with Rosh Hashanah, the first day of...

9/01/08 3:12PM EST: [UPDATES IN EXTENDED ARTICLE] Credible sources tell YWN that the missing body of 39-year-old Naftoli Smolyansky Z”L, who went missing while on a boating trip in Lake Piru, California has just been found. Naftoli was in a boat on the lake with his 9-year-old son and his two daughters, ages 5 and 7 last Monday afternoon, when his youngest daughter fell overboard. He jumped in to save her, and managed to push his daughter back into the boat, but he R”L went under and did not resurface. Hundreds of people joined the massive search by air, land,...

(IsraelNN.com) Two prominent Italian rabbis have sharply criticized the Vatican for its deleting two anti-Semitic remarks in Good Friday prayers and then replacing them with appeals for Jews to convert, according to the European Jewish Press. Pope Benedict earlier this week announced that the terms "blindness" and "darkness," referring to Jews, would be deleted. The Pope ordered the changes after complaints from an American "inter-religious" committee about the anti-Semitic words in the prayer.However, the new Latin text for the prayer states, "May the Lord enlighten them [the Jews] so that they recognize Jesus Christ as the savior of all men."...

From the Italian daily Corriere della Sera: Italian Rabbinical Assembly: "Pause for reflection in the dialogue" with CatholicsThe opinion on the change of the Good Friday prayer: "An abandonment of the very conditions for dialogue" ROME - And now, a rupture. The Italian Rabbinical Asseembly considers necessary a "pause for reflection in the dialogue" with Catholics after the modification of the Good Friday prayer for the Jews. And it underlines that the modification decided by Pope Ratzinger is "an abandonment of the very conditions for dialogue". The Assembly states so in a note signed by its president, Rabbi Giuseppe Laras.

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- On the eve of Super Tuesday, the oldest Orthodox Jewish Rabbinic organization in the country issued a historic declaration on voting and abortion. The Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the U.S. and Canada says Jewish voters should not vote for candidates who support abortion, calling them "antithetical" to Jewish values. Rabbi Yehuda Levin, a spokesman for the group, released a video message on Monday with the exhortation. "It is very important for our community to demonstrate its appreciation for our wonderful country by exercising our civic obligation to vote," he says. "However, it is even more...

Yesterday, Rav Avi Weiss and the Jewish activist organization he founded, AMCHA: the Coalition for Jewish Concerns, coordinated a civil disobedience protest at the United Nations. Around 50 rabbis and rabbinical students, as well as a lay communal leader or few, participated in the protest. They prepared themselves in a staging area near the Iranian Mission to the UN — putting on talleisim and distributing signs — and after a few short speeches and rounds of slogan-shouting, they marched, singing ‘Am Yisra’eil Hhai, to the steps that go down past the Isaiah Wall across the street from the UN buildings.

Rabbis for Human Rights Israel (RHRI) is at odds with its sister organization in North America over an issue that goes to the heart of the debate over Zionism's use and misuse of military might to defend itself. During a board meeting Monday in Jerusalem, some leading members of RHRI strongly criticized Rabbis for Human Rights North America (RHR-NA) for honoring a New York-based legal advocacy group that sued two senior Israeli security officials for perpetrating "war crimes." On December 11, RHR-NA honored the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) with the Raphael Lemkin Award for its work combating purported torture...

It was a bizarre sight: a cadre of Orthodox Jews, with their distinctive hats, beards and sidelocks, standing alongside President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran last month at a conference in Tehran debating the Holocaust. Among them was Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, spokesman and assistant director of a small anti-Zionist group with a foothold in this town in Rockland County, home to one of the nation’s largest communities of Hasidic Jews. Unlike Mr. Ahmadinejad and most of the others present, including the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Rabbi Weiss does not deny or question the Holocaust; his grandparents died...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Leaders of the Conservative Jewish movement opened the door on Wednesday to the ordination of gay rabbis and the recognition of gay marriage, but made it clear the more orthodox in the faith may go on opposing such liberalization. "We as a movement see the advocacy of pluralism and we know that people come to different conclusions," said Rabbi Kassel Abelson, speaking for the 25-member Rabbinical Assembly Committee on Jewish Law and Standards which issued a series of advisory reports. "These ... are accepted as guides so that the gays and lesbians can be welcomed into...

A group of rabbis has been ordained in Germany for the first time since World War II and the destruction by the Nazis of the country's Jewish seminaries. Three Jewish graduates from the Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam were ordained in the eastern city of Dresden. More than 100,000 Jews live in Germany but there is a dearth of rabbis - there are only about 25 of them serving 100 congregations, a BBC reporter says. For years Germany has had to rely on rabbis imported from abroad. The ordination took place in Dresden's new synagogue which was rebuilt after the...

Committee of Jewish scholars likely to roll back ban on ordaining gay rabbis. 'It is simply not natural to demand that they remain celibate,' one rabbi says, adding that movement has to 'interpret God's will' A key Conservative Jewish leader is organizing talks nationwide to tell synagogues that the movement will likely roll back its ban on ordaining openly gay rabbis by year's end. He and two religious law experts joining him at the meetings are trying to help congregations prepare for the confusion and discomfort to follow. Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative...

The Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) has called on Israel to reevaluate its military rules of war in light of Hizbullah's "unconscionable use of civilians, hospitals, ambulances, mosques and the like as human shields, cannon fodder and weapons of asymmetric warfare." The RCA made the statement at the end of a three-day solidarity mission last week in conjunction with Emunah, the modern Orthodox women's organization, during which a contingent of RCA rabbis toured the North and South, visiting the injured and gathering impressions of the extent of the damage caused by the warfare. Rabbi Basil Herring, executive vice president of...

Rabbi Dr. Einat Ramon appointed to serve as dean of conservative Schechter Rabbinical Seminary The Board of the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary in Jerusalem has appointed Rabbi Dr. Einat Ramon to serve as dean of the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary . Ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1989, Rabbi Ramon was the first Israeli woman to be ordained as a rabbi. She is also the first woman to head a Conservative/Masorti rabbinical school. Rabbi Ramon has been a courageous spokesperson for the Masorti Movement on crucial issues such as the conversion bill and the right to hold egalitarian prayers...