A special pardon committee that convened in Moscow on Monday afternoon to discuss Naama Issachar’s request for a presidential pardon recommended that she be released. If Putin approves the committee’s recommendation as expected, this will be the first time that a Russian president has ever granted a pardon to a foreign-citizen prisoner. Following Naama Issachar’s official request for a pardon from Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, a special committee convened at 4 p.m. on Monday to consider the request, according to a report by Russian news agency TASS. The announcement on the committee’s meeting came after Russian Commissioner for Human Rights Tatyana Moskalkova supported Issachar’s pardon request.

As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu flew to the United States on Sunday for the unveiling of Trump’s “Deal of the Century,” frum political figures and journalists formed a minyan to daven Maariv, making sure to include a tefillah for Middle Eastern peace. The minyan included US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, head of the National Security Council Meir Ben-Shabbat, military secretary Avi Blot, journalists and other frum people on the flight.

A plane carrying 136 passengers has skidded off the runway and onto a nearby street in the Iranian city of Mahshahr. Two people were injured in the hard landing of the Caspian Airways McDonnell Douglas MD-83 aircraft, according to officials. The flight had flown around 380 miles from the Iranian capital of Tehran to Mahshahr before its hard landing. Shocked passengers, along with their hand luggage, left the aircraft via doors near the cockpit and over the wing. A flight attendant can also be seen shouting towards passengers to walk calmly away from the aircraft. Speaking in Farsi, a passenger is heard saying: “We crashed. We crashed but we are unhurt.

The stakes over witness testimony at President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial are rising now that a draft of a book from former national security adviser John Bolton appears to undercut a key defense argument — that Trump never tied withholding of aid to Ukraine to a demand the country investigate rival Joe Biden.. Bolton writes in the forthcoming book that Trump told him that he wanted to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in security aid from Ukraine until it helped him with investigations into Biden. Trump’s legal team has repeatedly insisted otherwise. On Monday, a person familiar with the case said the White House has had Bolton’s manuscript for at least a month, and has challenged his use of certain material it considers classified.

A former Nazi party member was posthumously designated this month as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, one of the few former Nazis to be rewarded the title, a Times of Israel report said. Three years ago, a report on Israel’s Kan News, revealed the heroism of Kleinicke, who used his position as a senior Nazi official supervising construction in Chrzanow, Upper Silesia to rescue hundreds of Jews from transport to Auschwitz (12 miles away) by “claiming” them as workers. He also sheltered Jews in his basement who were too weak to work and warned Jews about upcoming deportations. Unfortunately, the Nazis gradually realized that Jews under Kleinicke were “missing” and he was reassigned to military training in 1943 as a punishment.

The Mossad agent who eliminated the main terrorist responsible for the 1972 Munich massacre spoke out for the first time last month on Israeli media. During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September kidnapped, tortured and killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team. German police officers killed five of the Black September terrorists in a failed attempt to rescue the hostages. The three surviving terrorists were arrested and held in Munich for trail but Germany released them after terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa airplane and threatened to blow it up if the terrorist weren’t released.

Visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau in recent months have been horrified by the sight of thousands of human bone fragments in pools of water around the crematoria, B’Chadrei Chareidim reported. Apparently, bone fragments survived the crematoria and thousands of bone fragments among the ashes have been scattered around the camp, especially in the pools of water surrounding the crematoria. In coordination with Polish authorities, a Zaka delegation and representatives of the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe (CPJCE) traveled to the site and saw the many bone fragments throughout the camp, but especially around the crematoriums where some of the ashes were thrown.

Ohr Neriya of Petach Tikva has been imprisoned in difficult conditions for weeks in Ukraine after being involved in an accident in which the father of a local police officer was killed, B’Chadrei Chareidim reported. Neriya’s mother said that although her son was declared innocent in court, he was imprisoned for another two months until a new trial is held. “You surely don’t know [my son] Neriya Ohr,” his mother, Dorit Ohr, wrote. “He’s not popular like Naama Issachar, he wasn’t caught with drugs abroad. But he was involved in an accident which unfortunately killed the father of a Ukrainian police officer. He’s already in jail for a few weeks in the Ukrainian cold – alone. He doesn’t have massive public relations connections like Naama Issachar.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) retweeted a false and unverified accusation that a herd of violent Israel settlers kidnapped, assaulted and murdered an Arab child from Beit Chanina who disappeared late Friday afternoon. As Israel Police searched for the boy throughout the night in difficult conditions, some of the boy’s relatives claimed that security camera footage showed the boy being dragged into a car by a stranger and began spreading rumors that Jewish “settlers” in the nearby neighborhood of Neve Ya’akov kidnapped the boy. They even issued a statement that if the unverified rumor is true and the boy was kidnapped by “settlers” it would set the entire neighborhood on fire. After the police and parents examined the footage, they said it was not connected to the missing boy.

A LOT Airlines flight from Warsaw to NY was forced to make an emergency landing on Sunday night. One of the approximately 50 Jewish passengers on the flights told YWN that a severely intoxicated passenger caused a major disturbance on the flight, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing in Iceland. For reasons unknown, the flight is unable to take off at this time, and the passengers are being put up in a local hotel for the night. Meanwhile, a group of passengers made a Kumzits while waiting in the airport. (YWN World Headquarters – NYC)