Jordanian security inspection officials cut off the leather straps of a Rav’s tefillin at the Queen Alia International Airport in Amman on Monday. HaRav Moshe Haliva, the Rav of the Sephardi kehilla in Dubai, flew from Israel to Abu Dhabi via Amman. When Rav Haliva went through security in Amman, security officials confiscated his tefillin, and after an hour and a half of arguments, and despite the Rav’s pleas that it was a religious object, they cut the tefillin straps in front of him and returned the batim to him. “I cried, I begged,” Rav Haliva told Ynet. “I explained to them that it’s a holy object, I told them that we’re cousins, that we also daven to Allah.

Moses Elisaf, z’l, the first Jewish mayor in Greek history, passed away on Friday at the age of 68 after a brief bout with cancer. Elisaf, a physician and professor of internal medicine by profession, ran as an independent in the 2019 Ioannina municipal elections and defeated the incumbent, in his first foray in politics. He served in the position until his death. During Elisaf’s election campaign, his political opponents claimed that he was a Mossad agent. Elisaf, who often visited relatives in Israel and worked at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University in 1993-94, said at the time that the claim was antisemitic but did not believe that antisemitism, in general, was a serious issue in Greece.

A van with 12 Lubavitch yeshivah bochurim overturned into a deep ditch on Monday night and one bochur was seriously injured. The bochurim, from Yeshivas Chayolei Beis Dovid in Poconos, Pennsylvania were returning from a trip to the Rebbe’s kever in New York. The accident occurred at about 9:30 p.m. The bochurim were evacuated via helicopters to local hospitals. One bochur was seriously injured and is in need of tefillos. The rest of the bochurim were injured to varying degrees. The public is asked to daven for the refuah sheleimah of Shneur Zalman Hakohen ben Elisheva b’toch sha’ar cholei Yisrael.

The case of the “Lebanese chasan” that shocked the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn came to an end last week when Eliya Haliwa granted his wife a get. Haliwa’s wife left him shortly after their marriage in October 2021 when she discovered his Lebanese passport and realized that her “Jewish” husband was a Lebanese Muslim who had never undergone geyrus. But then the story took a dramatic turn when it was discovered that Haliwa was actually Jewish, as confirmed by a Beis Din in Brooklyn In the wake of his outing as a non-Jew and the split-up from his wife, Haliwa spoke to his grandmother, his mother’s mother, who told him that her mother, his great-grandmother, was a Jewess named Sara Dwek who ran away from her family and married a Muslim.

A frum man walking with his wife and baby was violently attacked while walking in Stamford Hill, London. “A racist male unhappy with the child’s speed pushed the 1-yr-old shouting ‘Move *** Jew, I will stab & kill you’ before cutting the victim on his face/hand,” Stamford Hill Shomrim wrote on Twitter. The incident is only one in a recent spate of anti-Semtic attacks on Jews in London, including a man who entered a shop in Stamford Hill screaming: “Jews don’t give me a job. I have a gun.” He then emptied the till and ran off.

King Charles III awarded the knighthood, one of the UK’s highest honors, to British Chief Rabbi Rav Ephraim Mirvis, a statement by the UK cabinet office said on Friday. According to the statement, Rabbi Mirvis was appointed as Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2023 New Year Honors for his “significant services to the Jewish community, to interfaith relations and to education.” “I am enormously honored and deeply humbled by this award,” Mirvis said in response to the announcement. “It will be particularly moving for me to receive this award from his majesty the king in his first year as our monarch.” Rabbi Mirvis’s predecessor, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z’l, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005. (YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)

In shockingly disgraceful conduct and due to its own error, a Moldovan airline on Sunday removed all the passengers, mostly frum Jews, from a flight to Israel and forcibly expelled them from the airport. The incident occurred due to an error by Air Moldova, which registered two passengers with the same name as one person. As a result, when the passengers boarded the plane, one was left without a seat. Arguments began and in the ensuing chaos, the pilot decided he was quitting and canceled the flight. At that point, all the passengers, most of them Israelis who had spent Shabbos Chanukah in Uman, were removed from the flight and then expelled from the airport. One of the passengers told B’Chadrei Chareidim: “They treated us like dogs.

An emotional Hachnasas Sefer Torah for the zechus of Ukrainain soldiers took place in Kyiv with the participation of members of parliament, presidential advisers, army commanders, heads of Jewish kehillos, and Jewish soldiers. At the start of the event, the Rav of the Ukrainian army, HaRav Hillel Cohen, introduced the activities of a number of Jewish organizations that have been active in Ukraine since the start of the war – assisting Jewish and non-Jewish refugees, providing humanitarian aid, and rescuing the sick and elderly, among other activities. The event was attended by the mayor of Uman, who praised the use of Jewish hotels in Uman for streams of refugees from eastern Ukraine in the first months of the war – all free of charge.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday issued a Chanukah greeting to Ukrainian Jews and Jews around the world. “I bless the Jewish community in Ukraine and all the Jews in the world with a happy Chanukah,” Zelensky said. “A few were victorious over many, the light won over the darkness – so it will be this time.” “Chag Chanukah Sameach,” he said in Hebrew. “Glory to Ukraine!” (YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)

Pope Francis on Saturday declared as martyrs a Polish couple who were executed by German police during World War II for hiding Jews in their farmhouse. A farmer and beekeeper, Jozef Ulma, and wife Wiktoria in the Polish town of Markowa hid several members of the Jewish community, who were being hunted down during the German occupation of Poland. An informant apparently betrayed them, and the Jews were killed by police in March 1944. The couple were then shot to death along with their six young children, the oldest of whom was 8 years old. Recognition of martyrdom would permit the couple to be beatified, the last formal step before possible sainthood.