[COMMUNICATED]
Yartzeit this Shabbos – Take advantage now! Nothing pierces the heavens like the tears and tefillos of a yiddishe maame, let alone the maame of all yidden, Rochel Imeinu. Yes, the Rochel Imeinu who so selflessly gave away her simanim. The Rochel Imeinu who was buried in isolation in Bais Lechem, so that she can daven on behalf of her children when in galus. 
We are mere days away from Rochel Imeinu’s yartzeit, 11 Cheshvan, which comes out on Shabbos Parshas Lech Lecha. Year after year, yidden of all stripes flock to Kever Rachel on this vaunted day to daven for all that weighs on their hearts. However, since it falls out on Shabbos, the Kever will be closed and empty, except…

The Shnerb family on Monday celebrated the bar mitzvah of their son Aharon, two and a half months after their 17-year-old daughter Rina was murdered in a terror attack.
Attending the bar mitzvah were Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Tzfat and son of late Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu; Rabbi Yosef Zvi Rimon; Lod Mayor Yair Revivo; friends, and family members.
Rabbi Eitan Shnerb, father of the bar mitzvah boy, spoke about the song which he said “has accompanied him in a special way since Rina was murdered.”
“This song gives me the strength to both laugh and cry,” he said, singing the Mordechai Ben David song “Hinenei rofei lach” with the brothers.
Read more at Arutz Sheva.

Donald Trump Jr. named CIA officer Eric Ciaramella as the whistleblower who filed a complaint about President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The president’s eldest son, 41, sent out a link via Twitter to a Breitbart News story that named Ciaramella as the “alleged” whistleblower.
Ciaramella, a 33-year-old CIA officer, was named in a RealClearInvestigations report last week.

The family of Moshe Holtzberg, who survived the Mumbai masscare, is requesting families who named children after Rabbi Gabi (Gavriel) and Rivky Holtzberg to help them with a unique project, COL LIVE reported.
Moshe will celebrate his thirteenth birthday next month, and the family is working to collect stories of children named after his parents. The stories will be printed and bound, to be given to him as a bar mitzvah gift.
Parents who have named a child after either Gabi or Rivky can send in the child’s name, age, photo, and location, as well as a description of the child and the inspiration behind the name, to Snspielman@yahoo.com.

Anti-Israel activity on college campuses in the United States increased during the 2018-19 academic year, according to an Israel on Campus Coalition report that shows there was a record number of anti-Israel disruptions at pro-Israel campus events.
During the academic year, campuses on the East Coast experienced more anti-Israel events than any other region, including an increase in anti-Israel activity at Ivy League schools such as Columbia University, Brown University and Cornell University.
Harvard University experienced a rise in anti-Israel events over the past two academic years.

The New Right’s Naftali Bennett says he believes there’s “a very, very high probability” Israel will go to a third election within a year due to the ongoing political gridlock and inability to form a government.
That eventuality is currently more likely than a coalition taking shape, he says on a newly launched podcast, unless Yisrael Beytenu’s Avigdor Liberman changes course and agrees to join a narrow right-wing religious government.
He warns that the right will likely suffer “a great blow” in such an election. “I’m very pessimistic,” he says.
Read more at Times of Israel.
{Matzav.com}

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Turkey has captured Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s sister and wife in Syria, a week after the Islamic State leader was killed in a US operation.
Erdogan said that Baghdadi’s brother-law had also been apprehended.
It comes just a day after Turkish officials claimed that Turkish forces had captured Rasmiya Awad, 65, one of Baghdadi’s sisters along with her husband and daughter-in-law in the town of Azaz, just over the border from Turkey.
Read more at Independent.
{Matzav.com}

Unconfirmed reports have quoted other “unconfirmed reports” claiming that President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, has reached out to the organizers of the 13th Siyum HaShas of Daf Yomi to inquire about the possibility of President Trump attending the Siyum.

The Siyum, organized by Agudath Israel of America, will be held on January 1 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.

Matzav.com has spoken to event organizers, who say that, to their knowledge, this supposed correspondence never happened.

“It sounds like the typical story that people like to spread rumors about,” a source told Matzav.com.

Rav Chaim Kanievsky on Wednesday gave a brocha to two of  Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s advisers.
The advisers, Jonatan Urich and Boaz Golan, received a brocha for success “against the persecution by the Prosecutor’s Office and police.”
At the end of the meeting, Urich said: “With Hashem’s help and with the brocha of the Rav, we will see a yeshua very soon.”
Read more at Arutz Sheva.
{Matzav.com}

The mother of a young Israeli-American woman imprisoned in Russia has asked her lawyers to withdraw a petition to cancel the extradition of a Russian hacker whose case may have motivated Moscow’s decision to imprison her daughter.
Naama Issachar was arrested in April as she was transferring to a connecting flight in Russia while carrying a small amount of marijuana as she returned home to Israel from a trip to India. She was convicted of drug smuggling, a charge she denies, and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison.