Yeshiva World News

In response to the growing number of religious freedom assaults in the European Union, Congressman Stockman introduced H.R. 4650, the “European Union Religious Freedom Act.” It was referred to the Foreign Affairs Committee.

This bill seeks to amend the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 to include religious freedom violations relating to homeschooling, Jewish and Islamic meat production, circumcision practices, and religious garb.

“In countries like Bulgaria and Lithuania, parents can’t homeschool their children. In Sweden and Denmark, Jews and Muslims can’t prepare meat according to their religious beliefs. In Sweden alone, they face legal restrictions on circumcision. In France, citizens cannot wear religious garb in public schools,” said Congressman Stockman.

“These laws are unjust towards these Europeans. The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 needs to be updated with provisions protecting their freedoms on these religious issues. My bill would do just that,” Congressman Stockman added.

If enacted, this legislation would go into effect immediately.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

[VIDEO & PHOTOS IN EXTENDED ARTICLE]

The bodies of the Tel Aviv residents murdered in the Belgium Jewish Museum terror attack have been flown back to Israel for kvura. The flight bringing the bodies home arrived shortly after midnight on Tuesday, 27 Iyar.

Emanuel and Miriam Riva HY”D were killed in the shooting attack that occurred on Shabbos 24 Iyar 5774. Hundreds of members of the local Jewish community gathered at the site of the attack to give kovod to the niftarim prior to the flight back to Israel.

Zaka’s Moti Goldstein left Israel on motzei Shabbos for Belgium, where he met with leaders of the kehilla. He assisted in arrangements to bring the two bodies back to Israel.

The levaya for the couple will take place at 17:00 in the Kiryat Shaul Beis HaChaim.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem / Photos: ZAKA)

The eastern city of Donetsk was in turmoil Tuesday a day after government forces used fighter jets to stop pro-Russia separatists from taking over the airport. Dozens were reported killed and the mayor went on television to urge residents to stay indoors.

The city of 1 million was engulfed by fighting Monday when rebels moved to seize the airport, Ukraine’s second largest. They were repelled by government forces using combat jets and helicopter gunships. Associated Press journalists witnessed intensive gun fire throughout the day and into the night. Plumes of black smoke rose into the air and officials shut down Donetsk airport and nearby streets to traffic amid the fighting.

Donetsk mayor Oleksandr Lukyanchenko said 40 people, including two civilians, were killed in Monday’s fighting. Rebel leaders, meanwhile, said the deaths could reach up to 100.

The battles came as billionaire candy magnate Petro Poroshenko claimed victory in Sunday’s presidential vote, which authorities in Kiev had hoped would unify the deeply divided nation. Poroshenko, who is yet to be sworn in, has vowed to negotiate a peaceful end to the insurgency in the east, but also has called the separatists “Somali pirates” and promised he would stop them from sowing more chaos.

The bodies of about 30 insurgents were brought Tuesday to a hospital morgue in Donetsk, said Leonid Baranov of the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic, who was at the Kalinin morgue. The fighters had been wounded and were being transported to a hospital in a truck when it was shot up by government forces, Baranov said.

Baranov said up to 100 rebels were probably killed in Monday’s fighting, adding that many bodies had not been recovered because they were in areas under government control.

“As they (Ukrainian forces) are controlling the airport and the fight was there … we cannot right now identify exactly how many victims we have,” he said, adding that hundreds were also wounded in the fighting.

He said the morgue was too small to hold all the bodies and authorities were searching for refrigerator trucks pending identification of the dead.

AP journalists saw many dead bodies piled up at the Kalinin morgue but could not immediately count them or confirm Baranov’s statements.

Another Donetsk insurgent leader, Denis Pushilin, also said up to 100 people have been killed and asserted that up to half of them could be civilians, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

Pushilin said government snipers were firing at people trying to evacuate the bodies. His comments also couldn’t be independently confirmed.

Early Tuesday, unidentified men stormed Donetsk’s main ice hockey arena and set it ablaze, according to the mayor’s office. The arena, owned by a local Ukrainian lawmaker, was to host the 2015 world championships.

By Tuesday morning, the Donetsk airport was under full government control, Ukraine’s acting Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said, adding that dozens of insurgents may have been killed but government forces did not suffer any casualties.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, meanwhile, said it had lost contact with one of its four-man monitoring teams in Donetsk on Monday evening. There was no immediate claim of responsibility but rebel groups have previously kidnapped OSCE monitors in Ukraine.

In the neighboring Luhansk region, which like Donetsk has declared independence from the central government, the Ukrainian Border Guards Service said its officers repelled a group of gunmen who were trying to break through the border from Russia. It said one intruder was wounded and the border guards seized several vehicles loaded with Kalashnikov assault rifles, rocket grenade launchers and explosives.

The interim government in Kiev has pledged to press ahead with the operation against insurgents, which has angered residents, many of whom see the government as nationalists bent on repressing Russian speakers in the east.

Speaking at a televised government session on Tuesday, Vitaly Yarema, a deputy prime minister, said the “anti-terrorist operation” in eastern Ukraine will go on “until all the militants are annihilated.”

In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov voiced strong concern Tuesday about the decision to intensify the military operation in the east and called for an immediate end to fighting.

Lavrov warned Poroshenko against trying to win a quick military victory before his inauguration, saying that it would be “unlikely to create favorable conditions for a hospitable welcome in the Donetsk region.” He promised that Russia will be Poroshenko’s “serious and reliable partner” if he moved to negotiate an end to hostilities.

Poroshenko, known for his pragmatism, supports building strong ties with Europe but also has stressed the importance of mending relations with Moscow. Upon claiming victory, he said his first step as president would be to visit the troubled east. He said he hoped Russia would support his efforts to bring stability and that he wanted to hold talks with Moscow.

Lavrov welcomed Poroshenko’s promise to negotiate with people in the east and said Moscow was ready for direct talks with Poroshenko — without the United States or the European Union as mediators.

But Ukraine’s acting Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Ukraine has no intention of talking to Russia directly.

“The government’s stance is unchanged: bilateral talks without the presence of the United States and the European Union do not seem possible under current conditions,” he said.

Moscow has denied accusations by the authorities in Kiev and the West that it has fomented the insurgency in eastern Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in March but has stonewalled the eastern insurgents’ appeal to join Russia.

Russia, however, has kept pushing for Ukraine to decentralize its government, which would give more power to the regions and allow Moscow to keep eastern Ukraine in its sphere of influence.

(AP)

The Moscow Jewish Community organizes fifty festival events for adults and children on the occasion of Russia’s Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar’s birthday.

Festival actions will be timed to Lazar’s birthday according to the Jewish calendar: this year it is June 8. As to the Gregorian calendar, Lazar celebrated his jubilee on May 19, when the Russian President and the Prime Minister also congratulated him.

All festival events will take place in the “Jewish triangle” – a district of Moscow between the Jewish museum, the educational center and the charity center in Maryina Roshcha in north-west of the capital.

Master classes for adults, training for children, presentations of the Jewish community’s new projects will be held all day long. Everyone can personally congratulate Rabbi Lazar during the party.

(Source: FJC)

A judge in southern Iran has ordered Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear court to answer complaints by individuals who say Facebook-owned applications Instagram and Whatsapp violate their privacy, semiofficial news agency ISNA reported Tuesday.

It quoted Ruhollah Momen Nasab, an official with the paramilitary Basij force, as saying that the judge also ordered the two apps blocked.

Another Iranian court last week had ordered Instagram blocked over privacy concerns. However, users in the capital, Tehran, still could access both applications around noon Tuesday. In Iran, websites and Internet applications have sometimes been reported blocked but remained operational.

Facebook is already banned in the country, along with other social websites like Twitter and YouTube. However some senior leaders like Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif are active on Twitter.

While top officials have unfettered access to social media, Iran’s youth and technological-savvy citizens use proxy servers or other workarounds to bypass the controls.

The administration of moderate President Hassan Rouhani is opposed to blocking such websites before authorities create local alternatives. Social media has offered a new way for him and his administration to reach out to the West as it negotiates with world powers over the country’s contested nuclear program.

“We should see the cyber world as an opportunity,” Rouhani said last week, according to the official IRNA news agency. “Why are we so shaky? Why don’t we trust our youth?”

Hard-liners, meanwhile, accuse Rouhani of failing to stop the spread of what they deem as “decadent” Western culture in Iran.

(AP)

Most people have lost track of the number of delays surrounding the elections for chief rabbis of Jerusalem. The latest delay was caused by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, who at the last moment failed to appear for a Monday, 26 Iyar meeting of the election committee.

The meeting was set to get underway at 15:00, the first meeting of the election committee in an effort to begin finalizing plans for the election. The meeting was arranged two weeks in advance. However during the late morning hours the rumor spread the meeting was likely to be postponed since the mayor and City Council member Aryeh Ben-Nun would not be able to attend.

The mayor’s staff explained Mr. Barkat was summoned to the Prime Minister’s Office to discuss budgetary matters. The meeting in the PM’s Office was not planned in advance. Meanwhile the election committee was hoping to set a date for the election today but this did not occur.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)

From California to Rhode Island, states are confronting new concerns that their Medicaid costs will rise as a result of the federal health care law.

That’s likely to revive the debate about how federal decisions can saddle states with unanticipated expenses.

Before President Barack Obama’s law expanded Medicaid eligibility, millions of people who already were entitled to its safety-net coverage were not enrolled. Those same people are now signing up in unexpectedly high numbers, partly because of publicity about getting insured under the law.

For states red or blue, the catch is that they must use more of their own money to cover this particular group.

In California, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent budget projected an additional $1.2 billion spending on Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid, due in part to surging numbers. State officials say about 300,000 more already-eligible Californians are expected to enroll than was estimated last fall.

“Our policy goal is to get people covered, so in that sense it’s a success,” said state legislator Richard Pan, a Democrat who heads the California State Assembly’s health committee. “We are going to have to deal with how to support the success.”

Online exchanges that offer subsidized private insurance are just one part of the health care law’s push to expand coverage. The other part is Medicaid, and it has two components.

First, the law allows states to expand Medicaid eligibility to people with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line, about $16,100 for an individual. Washington pays the entire cost for that group through 2016, gradually phasing down to a 90 percent share. About half the states have accepted the offer to expand coverage in this way.

But whether or not a state expands Medicaid, all states are on the hook for a significantly bigger share of costs when it comes to people who were Medicaid-eligible under previous law. The federal government’s share for this group averages about 60 percent nationally. In California, it’s about a 50-50 split, so for each previously eligible resident who signs up, the state has to pony up half the cost.

There could be many reasons why people didn’t sign up in the past.

They may have simply been unaware. Some may not have needed coverage. Others see a social stigma attached to the program for those with the lowest incomes. But now virtually everyone in the country is required to have coverage or risk fines. That’s more motivation to come forward.

“It’s not a bad thing that we are opening a door that should have been open before,” said Judy Solomon of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, which advocates for the poor.

The budget consequences are real.

“Clearly we are going to need to do our best to make sure we are working within the budget we are given,” said Deidre Gifford, Rhode Island’s Medicaid director.

States always expected that some previously eligible people would sign up, but Gifford said her state enrolled 5,000 to 6,000 more than it had projected.

In Washington state, people who were previously eligible represent about one-third of new Medicaid enrollments, roughly 165,000 out of a total of nearly 483,000. But state officials say they are treating that as a preliminary number, and the true net increase may be lower once they factor in people who drop out of the program for a host of reasons, such as getting a job with coverage.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
Advertisement

Governors in California, Rhode Island and Washington state all strongly supported the health care law. Their outreach campaigns to promote sign-ups overall probably contributed to drawing out uninsured residents who already were entitled to Medicaid.

But researchers also are seeing increased Medicaid enrollment in states that have resisted the health care law.

A recent report from the market research firm Avalere Health found Georgia enrollment increased by nearly 6 percent. Montana saw a 10 percent rise and South Carolina 5 percent. A big exception is Texas, which has barely seen any increase.

“Anyone who didn’t budget for this is going to be behind the eight ball,” Avalere CEO Dan Mendelson said. “It’s the kind of thing governors will want to discuss with the White House.”

When the health care law was being debated in Congress, many states recognized they might face a problem if droves of already-eligible people joined Medicaid. States lobbied federal lawmakers — unsuccessfully — to get more money for that group, said Ray Scheppach, the former top staffer for the National Governors Association.

“States are concerned about this,” he said. “It’s something they had been worried about right along.”

(AP)

In Israel’s ongoing war against unreported income and money laundering state officials are developing a plan that would set a ceiling on cash transactions of 7,500 shekels. The state committee that is formulating a plan for taking Israel to a digital monetary market is headed by Harel Locker, bureau chief in the Prime Minister’s Office.

The committee is also seeking to limit the use of checks, preferring to shift the economy to digital traceable currency including debit and credit cards and increasing use of one’s smartphone with the various payment and wallet apps available. The committee will eventually compel Israel’s banks to shift to the new digital realities by compelling account holders to make the change.

The program is divided into three stages, with the first being limiting the use of cash following by limiting checks and finally encouraging digital payment.

In a later stage the ceiling for cash transactions will be lowered to 5,000 shekels and eliminating checks entirely. At this stage these are only recommendations.

Today’s law limits cash transactions between businesses to 20,000 shekels. It does not address transactions between businesses and private people.

According to the Prime Minister’s Office, in 2012 there were three million transactions over 5,000 shekels that did not include information identifying the parties and they totaled 273 billion shekels.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)

No private office tenant has signed a lease at One World Trade Center in nearly three years. The 3.1-million-square-foot skyscraper, formerly named the Freedom Tower, is 55% leased.

The owner—a venture of developer Douglas Durst and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey—is cutting asking rents nearly 10% to $69 a square foot for larger tenants on the building’s middle floors, down from $75 a square foot, Mr. Durst said in an interview Friday.

“The market’s not there,” said Mr. Durst, whose Durst Organization bought a stake in the tower from the Port Authority in mid-2011. “When we started in 2011, everybody expected the economy to take off, and obviously that hasn’t happened.”

The move adds to the financial challenges for the 1,776-foot building that is set to open its doors by the end of the year. With a construction cost of $3.9 billion, it is set to be the most expensive office tower ever built and has little hope of proving to be a good financial investment in the short term.

READ MORE: WSJ

The Malaysian government on Tuesday released 45 pages of raw satellite data it used to determine the flight path of the missing jetliner, information long sought by relatives of some of the 239 people on board.

But at least one independent expert said his initial impression was that the communication logs didn’t include key assumptions, algorithms and metadata needed to validate the investigation team’s conclusions that the plane flew south and crashed in a remote patch of the Indian Ocean.

“It’s a whole lot of stuff that is not very important to know,” said Michael Exner, a satellite engineer who has been intensively researching the calculations. “There are probably two or three pages of important stuff, the rest is just noise. It doesn’t add any value to our understanding.”

Almost three months since it went missing en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, no trace of the jet has been found, an agonizing situation for family members stuck between grief and the faintest hope, no matter how unlikely, their loved ones might still be alive. The mystery disappearance also has nurtured speculation and wild conspiracy theories.

Several family members have been highly critical of the Malaysian government’s response, accusing them of failing to release timely information or even concealing it. The government, which in the early days did release contradictory information about the plane’s movements, insists it is being transparent in what has been an unprecedented situation.

An international investigation team led by Malaysia has concluded that the jet flew south after it was last spotted on Malaysian military radar about 90 minutes after takeoff and ended up in the southern Indian Ocean off western Australia. This conclusion is based on complex calculations derived in part from hourly transmissions between the plane and a communications satellite.

An unmanned U.S. Navy sub that has been scouring an approximately 400 square kilometer (155 square mile) patch of seabed since April was scheduled to finish its mission on Wednesday. The Bluefin 21 has been searching in an area where sounds consistent with aircraft black boxes were detected last month.

The next search phase will be conducted over a much bigger area — approximately 60,000 square kilometers (23,000 square miles) — and will involve mapping of the seabed. The area’s depths and topography are largely unknown.

Officials are looking to hire powerful sonar equipment that can search for wreckage in deeper water than the Bluefin.

Angus Houston, who is heading up the search, said in early May that it would take a couple months before any new equipment would be ready to be deployed.

The technical data released Tuesday consisted of data communication logs from the satellite system operated by the U.K’s Inmarsat company. The plane sent hourly transmissions to a satellite. The signals were never meant to track an aircraft’s path, but investigators had nothing else to go on because the plane’s other communication systems had been disabled.

Investigators determined the plane’s direction by measuring the frequency of the signals sent to the satellite. By considering aircraft performance, the satellite’s fixed location and other known factors, they determined the plane’s final location was to the south of the satellite.

Sarah Bajac, whose husband was on the flight, doesn’t believe that the plane few south and had been highly critical of the Malaysian government. She has been at the forefront of a campaign to press the Malaysian government for more transparency.

She said that “a half dozen very qualified people were looking” at the information and she hoped to have their take soon.

But along with Exner, she was also critical of the way it was released. The government put it in a PDF file not in its original data form, making working with it far more time-consuming.

“A little tweak to make people work harder needlessly,” she wrote in an email.

Congregating in Internet chat rooms and blogs, many scientists, physicists and astronomers have been trying to replicate the math used, either as an intellectual exercise or out of a belief they are helping the relatives or contributing to transparency around the investigation into the missing plane.

Duncan Steel, a British scientist and astronomer, said some of the data “may” explain the belief that the aircraft went south rather than north, but that further confirmation would take a day or so. But he too was disappointed by the release.

“One can see no conceivable reason that the information could not have been released nine or ten weeks ago. Even now, there are many, many lines of irrelevant information in those 47 pages,” he said in an email.

Soon after takeoff, the plane disappeared from commercial radar over waters between Malaysia and Vietnam. The search was initially focused there but gradually shifted to the west of peninsular Malaysia. Authorities say they believe the plane was deliberately diverted from its flight path, but without finding the plane or its flight data recorders have been unable to say with any certainty what happened on board.

(AP)

Congress is stepping up pressure on the White House to confront Russia over allegations that it is cheating on a key nuclear arms treaty — a faceoff that could further strain U.S.-Moscow relations and dampen President Barack Obama’s hopes to add deeper cuts in nuclear arsenals to his legacy.

Butting heads with Russian President Vladimir Putin over compliance with a 26-year-old treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons is not something that fits into Obama’s “reset” with Russia, which already was stalled after Russia granted asylum to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. But the issue has been simmering for a few years and Republicans on Capitol Hill want Obama to address it head-on.

It’s unclear why the administration, which has raised the issue with Russia through diplomatic channels, doesn’t want to publicly blow the whistle on Moscow’s alleged violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in 1987. The treaty banned all U.S. and Russian land-based ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 300 miles and 3,400 miles.

There are several theories: The U.S. doesn’t want Russia to pull out of the treaty altogether, which would be embarrassing for a president who, shortly after taking office, declared his vision of a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has won Senate ratification of the New START treaty, the most significant arms control pact in nearly two decades. The treaty, which took effect in February 2011, requires the U.S. and Russia to reduce the number of their strategic nuclear weapons to no more than 1,550 by February 2018.

Last June, Obama announced in Berlin that he wants to cut the number of U.S. nuclear arms by another third, which would shrink the total to between 1,000 and 1,100 weapons for bombers and land- and sea-based missiles. He said he intends to “seek negotiated cuts” with Russia — something Congress would be unlikely to approve if Russia is found in violation of the 1987 INF treaty.

It’s an awkward time for Washington to be pointing a finger at Russia over nukes.

Besides the issues over Snowden and Ukraine, Washington needs Russia’s help in ending the Syrian civil war and sealing a deal that constrains Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for lifting economic sanctions on Tehran.

The Russians say they have looked into allegations that it tested a new ground-launched cruise missile in violation of the treaty and sees the matter as closed.

Republicans in Congress are getting impatient.

“By failing to even acknowledge Russia’s cheating — almost since day one of the ‘reset’ policy and during his New START treaty negotiation — the president has failed to lead,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, an Alabama Republican who chairs the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.

“The Congress — unwilling to wait any longer on the president — is moving ahead with declaring Russia’s conduct to be a violation of its treaty obligations. But we only have one commander in chief, and it’s time for him to put our defenses and other responses in place.”

The Republicans especially want to know whether the Obama administration knew about the alleged cheating on the INF treaty when it was asking Congress to ratify the New START treaty, which the president hailed as a “cornerstone of our relations with Russia.”

Earlier this month, Sens. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., asked the Defense Department’s inspector general to look into whether the Pentagon knew of “any and all compliance concerns regarding the INF treaty and the Russian Federation during the process of the negotiation and ratification of the New START treaty.” On Friday, 10 Republican senators sent a letter to the State Department asking its inspector general to look into whether the then-assistant secretary of state for arms control knew about the compliance issue — and didn’t tell the Senate — when New START was being ratified.

Moreover, the defense authorization bill the House passed last week included a clause requiring the administration to submit an unclassified report on the matter to Congress 90 days after the bill becomes law, and every 90 days thereafter. The report should address how the president is holding Russia “accountable for being in material breach” of the treaty and whether it’s a good idea for the U.S. to remain a party to it.

In June 2013, Russian presidential chief of staff Sergei Ivanov said the treaty cannot last forever. He lamented that the U.S. never needed the entire class of intermediate-range missiles that the treaty banned unless it planned to go to war with Mexico or Canada. Since the treaty was signed, countries along Russia’s borders, such as North Korea, China, Pakistan and India, have acquired these types of weapons, he said. “Why can anyone have weapons of this class but the U.S. and we legally cannot?” he said.

The U.S., meanwhile, continues to raise the cheating issue with the Russians, but only quietly — perhaps in hopes of keeping the treaty intact.

Rose Gottemoeller, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, acknowledged earlier this month that the U.S. has deep concerns that Moscow is cheating, but she and other officials have said little else publicly.

“We have serious compliance concerns with the Russians with regard to the INF Treaty,” she said. “I’ve raised them repeatedly. We will continue to do so until we’re satisfied. The concern has to do with a ground-launched cruise missile that has been tested.”

Right now, everybody is waiting to see whether the State Department’s latest compliance report, which was due in mid-April and has yet to be released, will accuse Russia of noncompliance. Last year, Congress required the administration to brief lawmakers by May 15 with or without the report. That deadline has passed as well and Republican lawmakers complain the administration has not reached out to brief them.

A State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not have permission to discuss the issue publicly by name, said the administration worked hard to produce a compliance report by April 15, which requires coordinated input from the State, Defense and Energy departments and intelligence agencies. The official said only that the report would be available soon.

The official said Secretary of State John Kerry had “raised treaty compliance issues broadly with Russia,” that Gottemoeller had discussed them more specifically with Russian officials and that the administration regularly updates Congress on compliance-related issues “and has done so consistently, as required by law, since coming into office.”

(AP)

In an ever increasingly digitalized world, a survey in Israel shows an increase in the number of visitors to the nation’s public libraries in 2013. The Ministry of Culture & Sport released the numbers after surveying 40 libraries as part of Reading & Literature Month. According to the ministry over one million Israelis have a library card for one of the nation’s public libraries. It also reports that on August 11, 2013, one million books were checked out from the nationwide system.

Leading the nation is Kiryat Arba, where 72% of residents use library services followed by Efrat with 69%. In the larger cities, Holon and Tel Aviv led in 2013 with 69%, and in Jerusalem the number was a mere 10%.

It appears the ministry study does not include the mobile chareidi library trucks that are commonplace in frum areas of the capital. In addition, the study only records the official state system, excluding libraries that exist in many yeshivos and private schools.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)

A bill is being sponsored that would bring Israeli law to the communities of Gush Etzion, which are now under the convoluted mixture of state law mixed with the British Mandate and Turkish laws as they live in the “territories” and not the State of Israel.

Coalition Chairman MK Yariv Levin and MK Orit Struk are behind the bill that would place Gush Etzion under Israeli law. This would include all the communities that are a part of the Gush Etzion Regional Council in addition to Efrat and Betar Illit.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)