JEWISH World News

According to Toronto’s Annual Hate/Bias Crime Statistical Report, which is issued by the Toronto Police Department, Jews have been the most targeted group in Canada in 2016 for the twelfth year in a row. Of a total of 145 incidents of hate crime reported to police, Jews were victimized 43 times. This is alarming especially since they only make up 3.8 percent of the city’s 2.8 million population. The number of incidents against Jews reached as high as 174 in 2009 and fell as low as 123 in 2011. The average number of occurrences is 141. There are some 200,000 Jews living in the Greater Toronto Area, making it Canada’s largest Jewish community. “Our own annual audit has shown a sharp increase in anti-Semitism over the past decade within Canada as a whole,” said Amanda Hohmann, national director of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights, according to CJN.

Pakistani authorities allowed Fishel Benkhald, a 29-year-old Jewish activist, to change his religion from Islam to Judaism on government documents, an anomaly for the religious sensitive area. Typically, these requests get rejected, as this form of “correction” is often seen as heresy. The ministry of interior has granted permission to Benkhald, who is known as Faisal in legal papers, to finally revise his registration forms to indicate that he is Jewish and not Muslim on his national identity card and passport. Benkhald, who was born to a Muslim father and a Jewish mother, was registered as Muslim since religion in Pakistan follows the father’s lineage. Although he attended an Islamic school as a child, Benkhald admitted that he never identified with Islam. There are 745 registered Jew families in Pakistan, but they keep a low profile due to the religious sensitivities of the country.

Serbia recently passed legislation allowing the estimated 1,000 Serbian Holocaust survivors living abroad to file for restitution for land that they owned privately or communally that was seized before the war. The Serbian law is the first to address heirless property since 47 countries approved the 2009 Terezin Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues, which called for the restitution of Jewish property, including heirless property. “This is a historic step to provide compassion and a measure of justice to Serbian Holocaust survivors more than 70 years after the Nazis declared Serbia free of Jews,” said Chair of Operation at World Jewish Restitution Organization, Gideon Taylor, who urged other countries to follow Serbia’s lead and supply restitution to the remaining survivors living aboard. Jewish property. The Serbian government pledges to provide about $1 million a year for 25 years to SAVEZ, the federation of Serbian Jews. For the coming decade, a fifth of those funds will be set aside for direct payments to Holocaust survivors. Funding for the program will also come from restitution to the Serbian Jewish communities of heirless and unclaimed Jewish properties unjustly seized during the Holocaust. Applicants have until July 31 to apply for the payments. Serbia today has approximately 1,200 Jews.

Israel appointed its first female Muslim diplomat, Rasha Atamny, 31, to be the country’s representative to Turkey, an influential Muslim nation which has good ties with Israel and is considered an ally. Atamny hails from the Arab town of Baqa al-Gharbiya in central Israel, located just inside the pre-1967 Green Line between Israel and the West Bank. She studied psychology at Hebrew University before being accepted on the hyper-competitive three-year Foreign Ministry cadet course. “As a girl who grew up in Baqa al-Gharbiya and experienced the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Jewish conflict in the flesh, I believed and still believe in peace between nations of the world,” she says. This is not the first time Israel has appointed an Arabic woman. Rania Jubran, a Christian Arab, worked for the ministry from 2006- 2009.