Yair Whiteson, 13, found as bronze ring while hiking with his father. Experts believe it depicts Minerva or Athena and dates be leading to a new chapter,” said Thoufeek Zakriya, a Hebrew calligrapher and scholar of Jewish history.

The settlement on the Carmel forest ridge has been under archaeological investigation for 150 years, yet the ring has only now been found.

Yair and his father gave the ring to the Israel Antiquities Authority, which dated the ring to be about 1,800 years old. It was found at Khirbet Shalala in the midst of the forest on Mount Carmel ridge, which once housed a settlement and farm. It is small, leading the archaeologists to surmise that it belonged to a woman or a child.

The IAA indicated that the ring will be displayed at the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein National Campus for the Archaeology of Israel in Jerusalem.

Hundreds of people gathered in Jerusalem’s Baka neighborhood on July 18 to complete a new Torah scroll dedicated to the hostages who remain held in Gaza. The Torah scroll project was initiated by Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the parents of hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, as part of a Week of Goodness effort led by the family to inspire acts of kindness.

The last 120 letters in the scroll were completed by scribe Akiva Garber that evening, each one dedicated to one of the remaining hostages. Israel believes 120 hostages are currently held by Hamas in Gaza, though dozens have been confirmed dead. The scroll will be housed in Hakhel Minyan Shivyoni, the Goldberg-Polins’ congregation in southern Jerusalem. The scroll was opened and unrolled for a brief readings from its end. The Goldberg-Polins recited the Shehecheyanu blessing.

This Torah scroll dedication was one of many held over the last nine months by various hostage families as part of their efforts and prayers for their loved ones’ return, the Jerusalem Post said.

Three Columbia University administrators have been “permanently removed from their positions” after sending a series of derisive text messages during a panel on campus Jewish life, Angela V. Olinto, the university’s provost, said in a statement. In an accompanying letter, Columbia President Minouche Shafik wrote that the texts echoed antisemitism and vowed to start a “vigorous program of antisemitism and antidiscrimination training” in the fall, when classes reconvene.

The three deans at the center of the group chat — Susan Chang-Kim, the university’s vice dean and chief administrative officer; Cristen Kromm, a dean of undergraduate student life, and Matthew Patashnick, an associate vice dean for student and family support — were placed on leave shortly after the texts first came to light.

Taking part in the fall training would be Josef Sorett, who was also involved in a separate text exchange with Chang-Kim during the same panel. Sorett said he had reached out to all speakers on the panel to apologize. In a petition, more than 1,000 Columbia alumni have demanded his removal. The petition said, “Sorett is wholly discredited in the eyes of alumni and students. His continuing as Dean of Columbia College is untenable.”

In the face of rising antisemitism around the world and the number of Holocaust survivors steadily decreasing, Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, is stepping up efforts to preserve Holocaust memorabilia. Part of the massive repository of Holocaust-related artifacts had been scattered around Yad Vashem’s vast campus, but now they will be housed in the new David and Fela Shapell Family Collections Center, which opened last month, housing the artifacts in a protected space to allow easier access for researchers and provide the most advanced technological conditions to safeguard them for future generations. More than 150 staff members will work at the site, gathering the names of victims and artifacts, and conserving and cataloging the objects.

“We are approaching a watershed moment in Holocaust remembrance,” said Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem. “We are entering the post-survivor era where we are going to be the messengers.”

 During the NBA playoffs, people were beginning to notice that the uniforms worn by the Dallas Mavericks seem not to say “Mavs,” rendered in all caps, but “Maus,” the title of Art Spiegelman’s 1986 bestseller, a graphic novel about the Holocaust.

Louis Keene, a staff reporter at The Forward, covering religion, sports and the West Coast, decided to call Art Spiegelman to see what he thought of the Mavs/Maus mixup. “That’s funny,” Spiegelman said. “I haven’t seen it, but I have no thoughts about sports at all. I couldn’t recite back to you what sports you were talking about.

As an afterthought, he asked, “Is there another team with cats playing?”

The German government has agreed to allocate $1.5 billion in Holocaust reparations this year, setting a new record for how much the country is spending to support survivors.

The increase from a total of $1.4 billion last year is due to a rise in the amount the government is paying to reimburse survivors’ medical expenses. But the sum paid directly to survivors has once again declined, reflecting the accelerating deaths of survivors. And the growth in the total package is expected to end soon as the number of living survivors plummets, according to the conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, known as the Claims Conference, the group that negotiates reparations with the German government. The group has calculated that about 245,000 are still alive, with the median age of 85.

The $1.5 billion set aside this year is broken into three categories: $500 million in direct reparations, a decrease from last year; $972 million to support the care needs of an increasingly elderly cohort of survivors; and $40 million for Holocaust education.

In a bittersweet ceremony held on Sunday, June 23, the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh broke ground for a memorial and a new Tree of Life building. The synagogue was the scene of a mass shooting on Oct. 27, 2018, when a gunman opened fire and killed 11 worshippers.

The building will house a sanctuary for the Tree of Life congregation — one of three congregations that were meeting at the synagogue at the time of the shooting — also an education center dedicated to combating bigotry, and a museum chronicling the long history of antisemitism in America.

The museum will be the first in the United States dedicated exclusively to the history of antisemitism in America, from colonial days through the hard-line anti-immigration  politics of the mid-20th century to the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017.