Rabbi Eliahu Birnbaum, a well-known Dati Leumi Rav in Israel, drank a L’Chayim to the state of Israel together with Lev Tahor members this past April. Rabbi Birnbaum is the founding director of Ohr Torah Stone’s Emissary Training Programs and he travels around the world mentoring rabbis and teachers in the outreach and education organizations Ohr Torah Stone (OTS) dispatches to Jewish communities around the globe. He also researches Jewish kehillos around the world. In a video of the unusual scene, Rabbi Birnbaum is heard speaking and lamenting the fact that he’s not in Eretz Yisrael for Yom Ha’atzamut and the mesiras hanefesh he took for him to be with Lev Tahor instead. He also mentions that “tonight is Yom Hazikaron for fallen IDF soldiers.

Dr. Aaron T. Beck, a groundbreaking psychotherapist regarded as the father of cognitive therapy, died Monday at his Philadelphia home. He had turned 100 in July. Beck’s work revolutionized the diagnosis and treatment of depression and other psychological disorders. He died peacefully in his sleep, according to the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which he co-founded with his daughter, Dr. Judith Beck. “My father was an amazing person who dedicated his life to helping others,” the daughter said in a statement, nothing that her father continued to work until his death.

For years, Zebulon Simentov was known as the “last Jew of Afghanistan,” the sole remnant of a centuries-old community holding court in Kabul’s only remaining synagogue. He left the country last month for Istanbul after the Taliban seized power. Now it appears he was not the last one. Simentov’s distant cousin, Tova Moradi, was born and raised in Kabul and lived there until last week, more than a month after Simentov departed in September. Fearing for their safety, Moradi, her children and nearly two dozen grandchildren fled the country in recent weeks in an escape orchestrated by an Israeli aid group, activists and prominent Jewish philanthropists.

The Greek Supreme Court outlawed shechita on Wednesday, a move predicted by Jewish leaders following the ruling of the European Union’s court last year upholding similar bans. Last December, the European Court of Justice ruled that member countries are permitted to ban shechita for the sake of animal welfare without infringing on the rights of religious groups. The Greek ruling was in response to a petition filed by the Panhellenic Animal Welfare and Environmental Federation. “We warned in December about the downstream consequences that the European Court of Justice ruling carried with it, and now we see the outcome,” said Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the European Jewish Association, which is based in Brussels. “Jewish freedom of religion is under direct attack.

A survivor of the terrible journey to Auschwitz remembered how the youngest wailed. There were 99 children squeezed among 751 adults gasping for air, crazed by thirst and hunger, aboard convoy No. 63 that departed Paris at 10 minutes past midday on Dec. 17, 1943. The 828 murdered at the death camp from that trainload alone included 3-year-old Francine Baur, her sister Myriam, 9, their brothers Antoine and Pierre, 6 and 10, and their parents Odette and André. All born in France, their French citizenship proved worthless under France’s wartime Vichy regime that teamed up with the country’s Nazi occupiers and their extermination of Jews.

Rav Menachem Ladayov, a Chabad Rav in the 17th Arrondissement of Paris, had a disturbing surprise on Sunday when he was delivered a Jewish magazine with an anti-Semitic message scrawled on its cover. Rabbi Ladayov told Kikar H’Shabat that he gets the Hebrew-language Kfar Chabad magazine delivered to his home every week, and it’s always wrapped in black plastic. For some reason, he received a back copy of the newspaper from Elul on Sunday wrapped in clear plastic, with the word RAUS (get out of here) in German written on it along with a drawing of a Magen Dovid. He thinks that since the anti-Semitic postal clerk was able to see the cover of the magazine, he ripped the plastic and scrawled the nasty message.

A Christian family, including a father and son posing as Rabbanim in the frum community in Phoenix, Arizona, were recently outed by the Beyneynu anti-missionary organization. The Isaacson family (previously Dawson), who is is in the process of making aliyah to Israel, have infiltrated several frum communities across the US, including Dallas and Houston in Texas, Portland, Oregon and Wisconsin, Milwaukee before settling in Phoenix. The father and son, Michael and Calev, have served on Batei Din and performed giyur, marriages and divorces, carried out multiple taharos of niftarim and wrote mezuzahs and Megilllahs and at least one Sefer Torah. They have led tefillos, blown the Shofar and hosted frum guests for Shabbos meals.

The Polish witnesses of the German crime in Wojslawice lived for decades with the memories of their Jewish neighbors executed in 1942. They remembered a meadow that flowed with blood, a child who cried out for water from underneath a pile of bodies, arms and legs that still moved days after the execution. In the years that followed, those who had seen the crime shared their knowledge with their children, warning them to stay away from the spot behind the Orthodox church where some 60 Jews, among them 20 children, were murdered on that October day.

A watercolor by Vincent van Gogh that was seized by the Nazis during World War II will be sold next month at auction in New York, where it is expected to fetch a price of $20 million or more, the auction house Christie’s announced. Christie’s is auctioning the 1888 work, “Wheatstacks,” after facilitating negotiations between the Texas oilman’s heirs who own it now and the heirs of two Jewish art collectors who owned it at different times before it was looted by the Nazis. Details of the settlement are confidential, a Christie’s spokesperson said. “Wheatstacks” will be auctioned Nov. 11 along with other artworks from the collection of Edwin L. Cox, a Texas oilman who died last year at age 99. The work depicts three haystacks towering over harvest workers on a bright summer day.

Hungarian Ambassador to Belgium Tamás Iván Kovács inaugurated a new consulate in Antwerp on Thursday and appointed a Charedi man as the Honorary Consul. Ari Epstein, who serves as the CEO of the Antwerp World Diamond Center, will serve as the Consul in the Flanders region, advancing economic and cultural ties between Hungary and Belgium. There is a large population of chassidic Jews in Antwerp and over 50% of them have Hungarian roots. One of the first steps that Mr. Epstein took was to launch the World Institute for Hungarian Jews inside the new consulate. The institute will advance ties between the Jewish communities in Antwerp and Hungary. A new book written by Rav Aryeh Tessler on the connection between the Jewish communities in the two countries was introduced at the ceremony.